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PREDESTINED 

A NOVEL OF NEW YORK LIFE 














PREDESTINED 

A NOVEL OF NEW YORK LIFE 


BY 

STEPHEN FRENCH WHITMAN 

n 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
NEW YORK : : : : : 1910 


Copyright, ipio, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 

Published February, 1910 



©G1.A2591S5 


CONTENTS 


PART ONE 

PAGE 

Eileen i 

PART TWO 

Marie 113 

PART THREE 

Emma 229 

PART FOUR 

Nina 347 






% 















































































PART ONE 


EILEEN 



CHAPTER I 


It was said that Felix Piers inherited his good 
looks and attractive manners from his mother, who 
had died in his childhood. The son had at home 
an old, faded photograph of her, by aid of which he 
made himself believe that he remembered her. She 
was portrayed in a beaded zouave-jacket and a vo- 
luminous skirt, wearing a chignon, leaning over a 
flower stand, before a fringed curtain looped up with 
heavy tassels. Despite her clumsy-looking dress she 
appeared charming, and in her face was beauty of so 
peculiar a quality that one was puzzled by it. What 
sort of woman had she been? The boy, noting her 
dark eyes and crinkling black hair, had always felt 
tender satisfaction at the thought that he resembled 
her. 

On the other hand, none could perceive what at- 
tributes Felix had obtained from the husband who 
survived her. 

This gentleman, Sheridan Piers, was bony, sallow, 
“plain-looking,” his eyes pale blue, his mouth hidden 
by a gray mustache, his face — which had been short- 
ened by false teeth — wearing invariably a saturnine 
expression. He attracted none of his acquaintances 
to intimacy. Even when young, for the most part 
he had shunned companionable customs. 


4 


PREDESTINED 


Shy and retiring as a boy, by disposition always 
solemn and austere, he had experienced in his life 
but one great happiness — an idealistic passion for the 
brilliant, ardent woman he had married. At her 
death, which occurred when she still possessed all 
her powers of fascination, he thought himself de- 
spoiled of everything that made his life worth liv- 
ing. When told that his intense grief would wear 
away in time, he repulsed his comforters with the 
fury of a priest before a shrine to which some one 
has offered sacrilege. He was determined never to 
mourn her less intensely. 

He was rich; he had no business; he lived a life 
of leisure. His mind was not adapted to profitable 
intellectual pursuits. His time was taken up with 
petty occupations. He was one of those persons for 
whom living has been made easy through inheritance, 
who never feel any positive incentive to achievement, 
who are content to spend a lifetime aimlessly, from 
time to time wondering at their ennui and discontent. 
Growing old, he fell into the melancholy ways of 
solitaries. 

He travelled; he made elaborate collections of curi- 
osities that might, perhaps, have been of use in mu- 
seums ; he accumulated rare books wherein the pages 
all remained uncut; he lined his walls with gloomy 
paintings that would have been appropriate in the 
chapels of cathedrals. But when he was on his 
travels the beauties and the gayeties about him roused 
in him no response. With a sombre countenance he 
looked at sunsets on Italian lakes, Swiss mountain 


EILEEN 


5 


peaks at dawn, the Paris boulevards in the golden 
dusk, Norwegian fjords by moonlight. Before each 
exquisite scene he forced himself to think: “If she 
were here!” In New York, amid his books and 
pictures, during the long evenings his thoughts were 
all introspective and regretful. Reviewing his un- 
profitable, lonely life, he told himself that its poor 
quality was traceable entirely to fate, which had 
deprived him of his wife. “If she had lived!” He 
asked himself unanswerable riddles: Why must we 
have sorrow ? Why do we survive for years to mourn 
a loved one? Why do we attain happiness just for 
a moment — just long enough to realize its worth? 
Sometimes he exclaimed proudly: “Have I for- 
gotten her? Have I ceased to mourn her? Am 
I like those people who get over grief?” His wife 
had furnished his life’s one romance; and faithfully 
he kept fresh his sorrow at the loss of it, as if by so 
doing he were paying back in part a great debt that 
he owed her. 

Monotony and solitary living made him, at last, 
morose, hypochondriacal, “peculiar.” He found the 
world a poor place ; he began to look forward curi- 
ously toward a future life, and wondered: “Shall I 
meet her there? How shall I find her?” He was 
drawn to investigate doctrines of immortality, was 
excited at the thought of “spiritistic phenomena,” 
and finally fell into the hands of trance-mediums 
and those adroit magicians who, in a darkened room, 
seem to materialize the dead. His name, his secret 
thoughts and habits, the intimate details of his family 


6 


PREDESTINED 


history were drawn from him by clever charlatans, 
and passed about through that profession which 
preys on the grief of the bereaved. In “private 
seances” he seemed to see, emerging from the shad- 
ows of a cabinet, the vague simulacrum of his wife; 
sometimes he heard her speak ; sometimes he touched 
her, kissed her, and then — his normal senses over- 
whelmed by emotion — believed that he recognized 
her face. She told him she was “waiting for him.” 
At last he shut himself up the more; his world was 
a world of shadows — a place thronged with invisible 
presences ; and when he went abroad he looked with 
impatience on the activities of healthy life, with which 
he no longer had anything in common. He had be- 
come an eccentric. His former associates told one 
another that his mind was diseased. 

But all admitted that he had acted the part of a 
good father. He had given Felix “every advantage.” 

In childhood, Felix was a quiet boy, dreamy, full 
of imagination, fond of looking by the hour at pict- 
ures in old books, attracted by gentle scenes and 
beautiful ladies, responsive to affection, easily moved 
in respect of his emotions. As soon as he learned to 
read, into juvenile literature he plunged headlong. 
New worlds were revealed to him. In fancy he 
floated through nebulae which took the uncertain, 
gorgeous forms of other lands and epochs. His soli- 
tary musings were then all of ancient Britons, of 
Carthaginians, of Aztecs, of peoples tattooed, painted, 
crowned with feathers, clothed in shaggy skins, en- 
cased in armor, following faithfully his own small 


EILEEN 


7 


figure through the fog of wild enterprises. Walking 
home from school, swinging his strapful of books, 
perhaps he was the King of the Incas, covered with 
gold ornaments, crested majestically with green 
plumes, passing judgment — in a hall of skulls — on 
some arch-enemy. “Away with him, to the tor- 
mentors!” Felix bumped into people on the street. 

When he was fourteen years old he was sent to a 
big boarding-school in the country. 

That was a rolling region. There patches of 
woodland, dim purple in the distance, were spread 
on the declivities of hills; there, in the valleys, were 
laid out fields of yellow, of rich green, of white, of 
terra-cotta color after ploughing time. The school 
buildings — all of red brick with blue slate roofs and 
gables — stood round a great grass circle. In the 
evening, when all the trees were motionless and 
seemed enveloped each in a separate, gauze-like haze, 
the sky would slowly turn from dusky blue to yellow. 
Down by the still lake, which lay beyond the foot-ball 
field, at that hour the swallows would come out, sail- 
ing and skimming here and there, low down, while 
uttering shrill cries which rang as if the sky were a 
hard dome of veritable amber. Sometimes the boys, 
returning from the tennis-courts, managed to strike 
down and kill a swallow or two with their racquets. 

This placid lakeside was a favorite of Felix’s. His 
dreams at that time, affected by his text-books, were 
based on models purely classical. In the flash of a 
window-pane on a remote hill-top, struck by the last 
rays of the sun, he saw the bright shields of the 


8 


PREDESTINED 


Lacedemonians. At the rumbling of thunder he 
thought of Attic shepherds falling on their knees in 
fear of the sonorous voice of Jove. Gray brushwood 
smoke adrift above the valleys brought up before him 
scenes of ancient warfare — the pillage and the ruin 
of old cities. He was in the Wooden Horse when it 
was trundled into Troy; he led the sack; he was 
prodigious in a brass helmet crested with red horse- 
hair. And “ Fair-cheeked Chryseis!” Now, in the 
background of every such sally of imagination hov- 
ered some fair-cheeked maiden observing all his feats 
of valor fondly. 

Taunted by his school-mates for his dreaminess, in 
self-defence he plunged into their gay activities. The 
habit of excitement grew on him. He became of all 
the school the most ingenious in devising spectacular 
and humorous escapades. He furnished gayety for 
every one, and so became popular. 

By his instructors he was thought precocious, tal- 
ented, and promising. But he grew restless under 
continuous restraint, erratic in his moods, subject to 
all wandering impulses that took his fancy, apt to 
forget completely, in an access of nervous gayety, his 
duties. He learned, at length, barely enough to 
“scrape through” into college. 

He went to live on a college campus — a tranquil 
place, full of great elms, of rambling white stone 
buildings, of winding flag-stone walks where under- 
graduates in odd head-gear strolled, pipe smoke above 
them, their arms over one another’s shoulders. Every 
hour there was thrust through the silence the sound 


EILEEN 


9 


of a clear bell calling to lectures. In the evening 
the voices of young men, singing with a harmony of 
many parts, stole from afar across the grassy stretches 
with a clarity as if across still water. Later, one 
heard the confused, uneven songs of revellers re- 
turning home to bed. 

One day a Freshman friend of Felix’s proposed to 
him in the street: 

“ Let’s have a drink.” 

They entered a cafe in the town. Felix concealed 
his curiosity, ashamed that he had never before been 
in such a place. 

Along one side of the cafe ran a bar, behind which 
three pyramids of glasses were reflected in large mir- 
rors. A man in his shirt-sleeves stood there talking 
to a rough-looking fellow who leaned across the rail, 
a glass of beer in his dirty hand. On the other side 
of the room one saw a row of wooden tables, their 
round tops marked with gummy spots and rings. 
There was sawdust on the floor. Against the plaster 
walls hung a pair of sun-bleached lithographs en- 
titled “The Birth of Venus” and “Diana’s Bath.” 
The two Freshmen seated themselves at a table. 
A negro in a stained apron, wiping sweat from his 
brow, came shuffling to take their orders. 

Felix resented the vulgarity of his surroundings. 
Why was it that the first step in certain new experi- 
ences brought disillusionment, dissatisfaction, and 
disgust ? 

“What will you have?” 

The boy glanced furtively at the lounger by the bar. 


10 


PREDESTINED 


“Beer,” he said, with a careless air. 

He raised his glass, buried his lips in foam, and 
took a long drink. He had an instant of intense 
surprise. Setting down his glass empty, he looked 
round thoughtfully. 

“By George! You must be thirsty!” 

Felix stared seriously at the other, without replying. 

Some students passing by noticed the two emerge 
from the saloon. Departing arm in arm with his 
companion, Felix gave them a proud glance. 

Neither youth confessed to the other that he had 
just learned something new. 

Felix soon found his friends, the sons of rich par- 
ents, jolly, full of spirit, eager to try their wings. 
They lived in expensive style, drove automobiles 
breakneck along the country roads, went walking 
with a swarm of dogs about them, kept polo ponies, 
had liquor cases in their “studies” and actresses’ 
pictures on their dressing-tables. Their evenings — 
when other, earnest-faced young men were making 
play with eye-shades and lexicons in private — they 
spent round smoky tables, where the crash of Rabe- 
laisian choruses was emphasized by the clinking of 
pipe-stems on steins. Becoming sophisticated, fi- 
nally they believed that they had little more to learn 
of “life.” They grew to detest their work; and, 
with delightful feelings of irresponsibility and free- 
dom, evaded, day after day, the tedious routine of 
lecture-rooms. 

In the June of his fourth year, shortly before ex- 
amination time, suddenly Felix realized that all 


EILEEN 


ii 


through his college course he had learned nothing 
well. Sitting up every night till morning with his 
books, he tried to do in two weeks the work of four 
years. In the still hours, while he bent beneath the 
lamp, all his past heedlessness — its charms grown 
stale — recurred to him, amazed him, filled him with 
remorse. Then recollecting himself, scanning his 
text-books afresh, he was aghast at his inability to 
grasp the meaning of whole chapters. He was 
thrown into a panic. He went to his examination 
hopeless. The examiners refused him a degree. 

“Well, Tve learned my lesson,” Felix said to him- 
self. He made resolutions. He came back the fol- 
lowing fall, did all his last year’s work again, and 
finally was graduated among the young men whom, 
in Sophomore year, he had “hazed.” 

One evening they sang their last song together, 
sitting on the grass beneath tall elms, the shadowy 
foliage of which was splashed here and there with 
the soft light of Chinese lanterns. A silver loving- 
cup went round; each, as he received it, stood up 
and drank from it, while the rest sang to him. Tears 
ran down their faces. 

It was all finished. Felix went back to his rooms 
and found them stripped: the walls bare, the pictures 
in piles, the chairs full of ornaments and souvenirs, 
in the midst of the litter a servant packing trunks. 
What desolation! Returning to the campus, he wan- 
dered off to find some friends, dragging his feet, his 
eyes wet. He had never felt so before. It seemed 
to him that he was full of grief and experience. 


12 


PREDESTINED 


Presently he found roaming about another sad 
young man — a poor student who had worked his 
way through college, who had never found time to 
make friends or to hunt pleasure, who had spent his 
four years in a small room with a bed, a wash-stand, 
a table, a coal-scuttle, a lamp, and a pile of second- 
hand books. In a cafe, where there was a dejected 
gathering of his friends, Felix presented himself with 
his arm across this young man’s shoulder. He felt 
that to be a fine gesture; he was touched by the 
thought: “ Sorrow, shared in common, levels all 
barriers.” 

Felix was sent round the world. He saw strange 
seas and lands. On shipboard he awoke, sometimes, 
to find blowing through the open port-holes air as 
extraordinarily flavored as if enveloping another 
world. He perceived across water for the first time, 
yet with the inexplicable thrill of an old traveller 
returning after many years, minarets, pagodas, a 
Chinese junk, spider-like Malay catamarans. He 
became enamoured of strange perfumes, antipodal 
music, women so fantastically charming that they 
seemed unreal. 

In those surroundings precious thoughts came to 
him, lingered just long enough to enchant him, and 
then were crowded out of his brain by more. He 
longed to save them all, to perpetuate them, to move 
others with them. Beside old ruins — amid the deso- 
late alleyways of Pompeii, in the red trenches of 
buried Carthage, before the colossi on the Nile at that 
fleeting moment when the setting sun, touching the 


EILEEN 


13 


desert hills, turns green — he was tormented because 
his ecstasies were inexpressible. Closing his eyes, 
he felt the past renewed about him. Pompeii was 
alive again, full of white togas and bright shawls: 
the ivory spokes of chariots flashed in the lanes; the 
gladiators showed their huge bodies and brutal heads 
along the promenades ; delicate, black-haired women, 
with ear-rings dangling to their shoulders, went un- 
dulating under scarlet parasols; and at the street 
corners little, thin Greek girls blew plaintive tunes 
on flutes. He saw the tall pitch-covered palaces of 
Carthage risen afresh : the streets were full of camels, 
wild soldiers, and women in black robes with painted 
eyes; the images of gods, moving in procession, glit- 
tered above the heads of the barbaric crowd. The 
monuments beside the Nile were new and unscarred 
again, and in and out between the pillars of the tem- 
ples stole the lean Egyptian priests, with flowers in 
their hands, the last of the sunlight flashing on their 
brown, shaven heads. Ah, to have such thoughts — 
which Felix considered very fine — and to be unable 
to disseminate them, to create with them in countless 
minds amazement, admiration, and respect! At last, 
on shipboard, he began struggling with pen and 
paper. But nothing looked the same on paper! 

He was away a year, and came home “ greatly 
broadened.” He had received his education. What 
should now be done with him? 

Sheridan Piers, rousing himself to interest, pon- 
dered this problem with Felix. They talked of a 
career in finance: it would be easy for the young man 


14 


PREDESTINED 


to obtain, through friends, an excellent position in 
Wall Street, with every chance of quick advancement. 
They discussed the advantages of law and of the 
diplomatic service. 

“You see, you should do something, Felix,” the 
old man said vaguely, winking his washed-out eyes in 
his perplexity. “Most everybody does. I haven’t; 
but then they say that I’m ‘peculiar.’ And you 
know you don’t take much after me.” 

They were, in fact, so far apart in temperament, 
that they had never possessed in common an import- 
ant interest or understood each other. Sheridan 
Piers’s uncongeniality and sadness chilled the boy 
and had their effect inevitably on the home. The 
house was characteristic of the man who lived shut 
up in it: a place furnished, with faded richness, 
in an unaesthetic fashion obsolete for two decades, 
filled with the souvenirs of a departing generation, 
exhaling the odors of old things, dim, chilly, full of 
echoes, lonely. Felix had seen so many bright and 
joyous regions that he was unable to have affection 
for his home or a desire to inhabit it. 

“Perhaps,” he said, “I’d do well in the diplo- 
matic service.” And he pictured himself in some 
foreign capital : at brilliant garden parties, balls, and 
state dinners, surrounded by beautiful and gracious 
women, courtly soldiers in fine uniforms, grave 
diplomatists expert in repartee and cynicism — in a 
world out of story-books, where everything was ex- 
hilarating, gay, sumptuous, remote from gloom. 

They decided that he was to “take his time and 


EILEEN 


15 

think it over.” Felix, while doing so, enjoyed him- 
self — laughed, played, spent money, fell in love, got 
over that, glanced every day at some lesson of the 
sort not taught in books. Sheridan Piers, for his 
part, went on dreaming, regretting, thinking of his 
wife. Beginning to grow feeble, he imagined that 
he had all sorts of ailments. He complained of ver- 
tigo, tremors, and roaring in the ears. He thought, 
now and then, that he heard a voice calling him by 
name. He commenced to read the Bible. 

One day Joseph, an old servant who had been 
with the family for thirty years, brought to his master 
a little, rusty, tin box, which he had found while 
rummaging an attic room. Sheridan Piers pried the 
box open. It contained a heap of tarnished trinkets, 
faded ribbons, dilapidated dance favors, newspaper 
clippings, a sheaf of yellow letters. It was a collec- 
tion of his wife’s mementos. 

A mist rose before the old man’s eyes; at first he 
could not bring himself to touch those objects which, 
long ago, she had used, cherished, and packed away 
with her own hands. After a while he drew from 
the box a coral necklace and a crumbling flower. 
Upon the brown leaf splashed a tear. Once she had 
held that blossom in her fingers; that necklace had 
been qjasped about her throat. He remembered it, 
and how she had looked while wearing it. His 
memory of her was of a beautiful young woman, 
fresh, radiant, redolent with a delicious sweetness. 

Trembling with emotion, he began to read the 
letters. 


i6 


PREDESTINED 


He did not know the handwriting. Each letter 
was signed simply with a “P.” All were dated 
“Paris,” where he and his wife had lived for several 
winters, where, at the death of his father in America, 
he had been forced to leave her for a few months. 
He remembered that year perfectly; it was the year 
of Felix’s birth. 

But whom were these letters from? 

He read some sentences. Written in French, 
they were exquisitely worded. They spoke of love. 
He realized that he was reading the love-letters of 
some other man, addressed to her. 

He stared before him, without breathing, his face 
disfigured by apprehension. For a minute his hands 
trembled so that he could not continue reading. 

Presently, rousing himself to action, he arranged 
all the letters in order, according to their dates. The 
correspondence had extended over a period of two 
years ! 

He commenced with the first letter. Cold all over, 
he read deliberately page after page. He was ter- 
rified by the elegance, the charm of each succeeding 
period. He had a sensation of faintness at seeing 
here expressed for her, with passionate fluency, such 
thoughts as even he had never had. 

The letters began with protestations, entreaties, 
accusations of “cruelty.” But soon the anxious 
note in them gave place to an accent of assurance. 
Each page brought him nearer to the discovery he 
dreaded. Should he go on? 

Soon he was reading of passed notes, kisses behind 


EILEEN 


17 


curtains and in carriages, subtle machinations and 
deceits, finally clandestine meetings. After all the 
years, her feminine reluctance to destroy those senti- 
mental treasures, her woman’s yearning to keep by 
her all her dearest trophies had betrayed her. 

He came to the letters that had been written while 
he was away. A terrible suspicion seized him. 

Suffocating, he got up to raise a window. Sud- 
denly he fell flat upon the floor, as if struck down 
with a club. Old Joseph found him there, lying 
amid the scattered letters. 

To Sheridan Piers’s bedside came quickly two dig- 
nified physicians. With the impassive countenances 
of those who see, every day, tortured bodies struggling 
between life and death, attentively they watched the 
patient. Lying on his back, unconscious, with half- 
opened eyes, slowly puffing out his cheeks, he ex- 
pelled his breath. They raised his eyelids, listened 
to the beating of his heart, felt his arteries with their 
long, flexible fingers, tapped his knee-caps, lifted one 
by one his arms and legs and let them fall. They put 
their heads together and decided that he had suffered 
a stroke of apoplexy. 

“Well, Doctor, what would you say?” 

“A hemorrhage of the interior capsule, Doctor, but 
not a fatal one. We have this time merely a paralysis 
of the left arm, extending to and including the pec- 
toralis major. We can, I think, at a conservative 
estimate, give him a month for a partial recovery. 
We shall have then considerable debility, feebleness 
of the affected parts, and perhaps — remembering the 


i8 


PREDESTINED 


patient’s well-known past oddity of conduct — an in- 
creased eccentricity. As for the second shock, when 
it comes, he may survive it. But of course a third 
would finish him.” 

They did everything necessary and departed. 

When he recovered the use of his body, every one in 
the house observed that he was greatly changed. He 
would not see Felix; he spoke to none save Joseph; 
he sat alone in his room, huddled before the fireplace, 
staring at the flames. Every day he became more 
debilitated. The foundations of his existence had 
been struck from beneath him ; he was crumbling to 
pieces. 

He could not keep his hands off the letters. He 
reread them, crushed them, tore them, hurled them 
from him. Then, gathering them up, he smoothed 
them out and pieced them carefully together. Poring 
over them, with bated breath, he thought of his be- 
trayal by the woman who had been for him a divinity, 
imagined the secrets of her life, pictured to himself 
all that she had lived through without his knowledge 
— with another. It was as if it had just happened, 
for he had just discovered it. 

He perused the clippings that he had found with 
the letters. They revealed the history of the man; 
all his public activity was reported in them. Of 
everything he had done in those days she had treas- 
ured these accounts. How she must have loved him 
— this stranger! 

At last, in a frenzy of hatred, he hurled the tin box 
and its contents into the fire. The letters and the 


EILEEN 


19 


clippings burst into flames; the trinkets glowed and 
melted among the coals; the tin box crackled and 
twisted on a bed of ashes. When all was consumed, 
how he desired to have it back again! 

Sometimes he called out her name, over and over, 
in reproach, till old Joseph came running to him. 
Then he was apt to believe that she was living, that 
they were in Paris, that she was planning with her 
lover to deceive him. “ Where are they to-night, 
Joseph ? You must hunt for them. Let me tell you : 
you’ll find them at a ball, in an alcove, behind some 
palms; or in the back of a box at the opera; or, if 
you hide on a street corner, you’ll see them coming 
home in a closed carriage with the horses walking. 
You’re to go up to the carriage window and whisper: 
4 Mr. Piers wants to speak to you.’ That’ll surprise 
them; don’t you believe so? You know they think 
I’m very stupid.” 

Finally he got the idea that Felix was involved in 
their deceit and that he must outwit the three of 
them. How could he do it ? He sat plotting by the 
hour, looking cautiously about him. He hit upon a 
plan. 

He sent for a young broker who had been involved 
in some “shady” business in the past and of whom 
persons of integrity knew nothing edifying. Sheridan 
Piers received this man with a calm and plausible 
demeanor. He had attained the cunning of the 
demented. 

“You see, Mr. Noon, I’m afraid I haven’t long to 
live, and before I die I want to make considerable 


20 


PREDESTINED 


changes in the disposition of my property. If you 
undertake my affair, you’ll find it a large one. But 
I shall have my work done very quietly. No gossip- 
ing. There are some, you know, who think a man 
has no right to do what he wants with his own 
money.” 

The broker, looking down, smiled deprecat ingly. 

Sheridan Piers sold all his outlying real estate. 
He disposed of all his stocks. He borrowed, quietly, 
as much money as would equal the value of his house, 
his stable, and their contents. Little by little, with- 
drawing his deposits from the banks, he accumulated 
his whole fortune in his house without any one know- 
ing that he had it there. One evening he had a hot 
fire kindled in his room. He locked himself in and 
paid no attention when the whole household besought 
him to come out. 

At midnight Felix sent for a physician. 

They broke into the room. They found the old 
man standing, with a blank face, beside the fireplace, 
which was choked with ashes. He could not recog- 
nize anybody, and took his physician for the man 
who, twenty-five years before, had wronged him. 
At this hallucination he had another “ stroke.” 

He died in a few hours. Before the end, to Felix, 
who bent over him, he whispered significantly: 

“You’re to look to them hereafter, d’you under- 
stand?” 

He had destroyed his fortune, leaving nothing. 

Felix, in distraction, rushed off to the family’s 
lawyer. 


EILEEN 


21 


When that gentleman appreciated the disaster, at 
once he took thought for his reputation. Malicious 
persons would say that he was to blame for not hav- 
ing long since deprived his client of power to transact 
his business. Looking at Felix thoughtfully, he asked 
the miserable young man: 

“Who knows about this destruction of the prop- 
erty besides you?” 

“Joseph.” 

“Ah, we can depend on him! Now, of course, it 
must go no farther — it’s too shocking. We can’t 
make the family name notorious with such an ex- 
traordinary tale. I’m your father’s executor, and 
in his last will everything is left to you. You and I 
will appear to go over the estate together. We shall 
find that it was ‘greatly overestimated’ — you under- 
stand me? That will do for the present. A year 
from now there will be no public interest. That’s 
the way to fix it!” 

The lawyer, though not troubled ordinarily by con- 
science, felt some responsibility in this affair. He 
was just then on the point of setting out for a vacation 
in the woods. It occurred to him that it would be a 
generous act to take Felix along with him. Before 
he went he saw the house and its contents sold, to pay 
the debts that Sheridan Piers had contracted. When 
he and the boy set out, Felix had nothing left but 
fifteen hundred dollars, his balance at the bank. 

In a fishing camp at the edge of a great forest, 
where the clear air was sweet with the odor of spruce- 
trees, where loons laughed in mid-lake and deer 


22 


PREDESTINED 


came down to drink and the cool nights were made 
beautiful by northern lights, finally the boy conquered 
his dismay. Plied with encouragement and good 
advice, he became almost philosophical. At twenty- 
five the greatest sorrows are not poignant for long, 
the greatest losses soon cease to seem irreparable. 
Youth, instead of repining, looks always forward. 
Felix turned his eyes toward the future. 

He had decided what he was going to do. It 
seemed to him now that all through his life every 
inclination and predilection of his had been urging 
him toward one vocation. With feelings of calmness 
and of assurance, as if he had solved at last the mean- 
ing of all his spiritual cravings and emotions, he con- 
templated his career. He intended to become “a 
famous writer. ,, 

Late in the evening, when, on the luminous waters 
of the lake, islands and peninsulas seemed like mys- 
terious, long shadows suspended in mid-air, Felix, 
looking with awe into the spangled sky, felt in him- 
self illimitable possibilities. The solitude, the hush, 
the swimming vagueness of the lake, the solemnity 
of the bright heavens ennobled him. It was as if 
a strange soul, finer than his own, possessed him. 
For the moment, so ethereal were all his sensations 
that no heights seemed unattainable. Exalted by 
superb aspirations, he dreamed of the future, which 
appeared before him like a bright mist, glittering 
resplendently. 


CHAPTER II 


It was toward the end of June when Felix got back 
to New York. 

He found the place greatly changed. The streets 
that he had known from childhood all appeared 
strange to him ; the faces of the people seemed selfish 
and unfriendly; his own city wore a cold, hostile 
aspect. 

He felt at once great need of sympathy. The 
bluff encouragement, the slap on the back that he 
might expect from his friend the lawyer, and from 
other men, would be of no use to him. He pictured 
to himself the solace of a gentle woman’s compre- 
hension: the soft hand resting on his hair, the eyes 
so quick to fill with tears, the tender heart so ready 
to share sorrow. He might, he thought, unload much 
of his sadness upon some fond woman. 

At his club — to which he went at once, with the 
intention of staying there till he contrived some defi- 
nite scheme of living — he found waiting for him a 
letter. It was from a widow of sixty, a Mrs. Ferrol, 
who had gone to school with his mother and who had 
always been his friend. 

Writing from her summer home in the country, she 
told Felix that she wanted him to come and visit her. 
“I can think of no better place than this for you to 
23 


24 


PREDESTINED 


spend the next month or two; you need, just now, 
what we have here. The country is beautiful; the 
sun shines every day; and you will find here two 
women who are very fond of you.” 

She alluded to her daughter Nina, twenty-three 
years old, whom Felix had known all his life, and for 
whom he had, whenever he thought of her, the affec- 
tion of a good brother. 

He was touched by the letter. It offered him 
what he had just been longing for. He thought of 
how he would appear before them, changed by mis- 
fortune, rather a pathetic figure, and of how they 
would indulge him, divert him, humor with a thou- 
sand little tender wiles his gloominess. Two gentle 
women to console him, in beautiful surroundings! 

He telegraphed to them that he was coming, and 
the same afternoon set out. 

The Ferrol farm was in Westchester County. 
Felix rode for an hour on the railway; and Nina, 
bareheaded and tanned, met him at the station with a 
cart. 

She was a brown-haired girl with a plump, vigor- 
ous shape. Her skin was fine; her cheeks were 
pink ; her blue eyes were wide open, showing a good 
deal of the whites, which gave them an alert, frank 
expression. Her upper lip was lifted to a little point. 
She looked competent and self-reliant. 

“Dear old boy!” she exclaimed in a full voice. 

“This is very kind of you, Nina.” 

“Is it? Jump in. I want to show you this 
horse.” 


EILEEN 


25 


She drove swiftly through the village and out into 
a country road. The hills on either side were emer- 
ald green. The soft, blue sky was flecked with little, 
brilliant clouds. A breeze, perfumed with verdure 
and wild flowers, blew in their faces. 

Giving him a quick glance, she remarked : 

“You’re looking fairly well.” 

He sighed. Apparently she did not hear, She said : 

“I’ll let him out here.” 

The horse leaped forward. Between his collar and 
her hands the taut reins quivered. The wind 
whistled past. Her loose hair, coming undone, blew 
round her forehead and out behind her neck. Her 
face was calm ; she wore a look of satisfaction. 

In the fields farmers straightened themselves and 
stared. A boy on a plough-seat held himself motion- 
less, his whip half raised. All along the road, behind 
the cart, a fog of saffron-colored dust hung trembling 
in the air. 

Ahead, on the top of a hill, appeared the house sur- 
rounded by tall trees, with terraces before it covered 
with the white, purple, pink, and yellow bloom of 
hardy shrubs. Above tiers of flowering spiraea, lilacs, 
azaleas, and jasmine bushes rose a long, solid- 
looking building of three stories, flat-roofed, of red 
brick trimmed with white stone in the Georgian 
style. Beyond it, to the right, showed through trees 
the top of a windmill and the roofs of stables and 
farm buildings. A sound of many dogs barking 
suddenly came down the breeze. 

As the cart climbed the hill, in the mellow sunshine 


26 


PREDESTINED 


of late afternoon the terraces displayed hues almost 
unnaturally gorgeous, the trees seemed powdered 
thick with ruddy gold-dust, the brick walls of the 
house were rose-colored; from the windows flashed 
a blinding, flame-like radiance. Above, the fleecy 
clouds, all motionless, were turning pink. And Felix 
saw, standing between the stone pillars of the door- 
way, shading her eyes with one hand, Nina’s mother. 

He thought : “ It’s almost like coming home. ” In 
fact, he reflected, it was better, for he had never 
come home to two kind women. 

On the hill-top Felix began a tranquil, indolent 
existence. He told himself he was there taking leave 
of leisure, and he wished to enjoy that farewell lin- 
geringly. Every morning when he awoke, leaning 
from his window he looked forth lazily, replete with 
placid satisfaction. 

The house stood high. Below it, on all sides 
stretched out undulating vistas, vivid in sunlight, 
bluish in great spots beneath eclipsing clouds, fading 
at middle distance into a haze of old-gold summits 
and vague valleys touched with shades of golden 
green. Through that region, winding roads lay like 
yellow threads cast down at random; among the 
hills church spires of distant hamlets stuck up like 
needle points; and on the horizon sparkled the 
water of Long Island Sound, as tenuous and keen 
as a thin edge of steel. 

The air of a new day drifted through the long, open 
windows of the breakfast-room. On the table the 
silver and the glassware glittered in the clear light; 


EILEEN 


27 


a blue flame flickered underneath the coffee-pot ; the 
flagrant red and yellow of nasturtiums in a crystal 
bowl epitomized, for Felix, the vigorous beauty of 
the morning. Seated at breakfast between the 
mother and the daughter, he had sensations of do- 
mesticity that softened him. 

When, after breakfast, he made the rounds of the 
farm with Nina, the whole world seemed so freshly 
washed, so pure, that all his thoughts were simple, 
guileless, and immaculate. He felt full of kindly, 
innocent impulses. Looking about him — at the sun- 
light on the hills, the sky, the birds in flight — he 
thought, with a thrill of exaltation: “How beautiful 
the world is!” He appreciated everything. He 
shared with Nina all her enthusiasms. 

In the stables, which smelled of clean straw and 
ammonia, he caught her affection for the horses, her 
pride in their fineness, her anxiety when any one of 
them fell ill. In the barn-yard he counted eggs with 
her; they drove a brood of fledglings to and fro, to see 
them scamper ; they laughed together at the haughty 
airs of old roosters. In the kennels, where white bull- 
terriers came rushing, forth with yelps and whines of 
welcome, he was pleased at the fondness that so many 
dumb things showed for him. Nina gave him a 
five months , old puppy, whose parents had both 
won ribbons at “bench shows.” Felix named the 
dog Pat, and taught him to fetch, lie down, go home, 
and heel. The little, shambling beast followed his 
new master everywhere, howled outside closed win- 
dows, scratched the sills, brought in dead birds that 


28 


PREDESTINED 


he had found in the fields, frisked through the 
flowers, hid bones among the roses, had to be cuffed 
every hour. 

In the garden enclosed by trellises, its plats defined 
by narrow gravel paths, Felix lounged on a bench 
with a book while Nina tended rows of blossoms. 
The rose-stems drooped with the weight of full-blown 
petals, on the smooth surfaces of which lay little drops 
— like tears, as Felix thought, on satiny cheeks. The 
daisies made him think of simplicity — of young girls 
in white dresses. Mignonette exhaled a dainty, 
languorous redolence; he imagined, while smelling 
it, moonlit balconies covered with pale flowers to 
which dark chamber windows opened. But the 
forced tuberoses, with their excessive, almost cor- 
poreal sweetness, suggested, to his amazement, the 
intoxication of a long embrace. He looked at Nina. 
She was stooping, with scissors and a wicker basket, 
before the flower borders. Her back was toward 
him. The thin stuff of her dull-blue dress was 
stretched across her shoulders; about her, on the 
gravel, her full skirt belled out. Felix, watching her, 
was lost in curiosity. Had she, too, sometime be- 
lieved herself in love ? What sentimental experiences 
did she remember? These questions Felix found 
peculiarly engrossing. 

She had a fine figure, but feared that she was grow- 
ing stout. To avoid that she had got made an India- 
rubber coat, skin-tight, which she put on underneath 
her clothes when she went riding. She weighed her- 
self every morning, examined her shape in mirrors 


EILEEN 


29 


with anxiety, and was in the habit of asking Felix over 
her shoulder, while smoothing down her skirt about 
her hips: 

“Do you think I've taken any off to-day?” 

Every day they rode abroad through the country 
lanes, searching out unfrequented ways where sumac 
bushes hung in wild tangles over the edges of the 
gullies and the road-bed was soft for galloping. 

She rode astride, in a gray skirt and a white waist, 
with stained gloves on her hands, bareheaded, ruddy, 
alert. 

“Come on, Felix!” 

They went at full speed to a swift thudding of 
hoofs and a patter of flying pebbles. Protruding 
twigs tore at their shoulders; they lowered their 
heads sharply to escape branches of outgrowing sap- 
lings; knee to knee in the narrow road, each strove to 
pass the other. They forgot everything but the rush- 
ing of the wind, the cadence of the gallop, the spas- 
modic plunges of the beasts beneath them. At sharp 
corners, seized suddenly with apprehension when it 
was too late to pull up, they shouted frantically: 

“Look out ahead!” 

Sometimes, after a long ride, they would walk their 
horses all the way home. They talked of themselves, 
of their ideas, perhaps of their impressions got from 
the books which they had read the night before, of 
what they liked and disliked, of the things that 
affected them the most. And their conversations 
would be interrupted, now and then, by such excla- 
mations as : “Has that occurred to you, too ? ” “You 


30 


PREDESTINED 


feel that way also?” “Imagine your having thought 
of that!” “Then you can understand me when I 
say . . .” Finishing their discussions, riding on in 
silence, they would feel a peculiar contentment, 
tinctured with surprise, at being able to express their 
thoughts so clearly to each other. 

Where old stone boundary walls beside the road 
were masked with honeysuckle they heard the wild 
bees droning. Where, at the entrances of little 
woods, the tree tops came together overhead, passing 
into spaces of cool shadows, they smelled moist moss 
and loam, and listened, with upturned faces, to the 
unexpected, capricious melody of birds. Occasion- 
ally, while climbing their own hill, they were sur- 
prised to discover high in the fading blue the pallid 
outline of the moon, almost invisible. They turned, 
on the ascent, to gaze back at the purple shadows 
lying in the valleys, the obscuration of the east, the 
first lamplight twinkling in some cottage window. 
For them there was a subtle charm in coming safely 
home at nightfall. 

One evening when, tired, happy, full of tranquillity, 
they reached the summit of the hill, they saw stand- 
ing before the house an automobile. A visitor had 
arrived! They found him sitting with Mrs. Ferrol in 
the dusky library. He rose — a tall, thin shape — 
and took a step forward. A quiet voice said: 

“Nina?” 

She gave a start. 

It was an old admirer of Nina’s who had been 
travelling in Europe for his health. Landing un- 


EILEEN 


3i 


expectedly that morning in New York, he had just 
got back to his father’s summer home, which lay some 
fifteen miles away across the hills. 

His name was Denis Droyt. He was a sedate 
young man, rather old for his age, of steady habits, 
always full of that serene assurance which comes from 
contemplation of such assets as a secure place in good 
society and an impregnable fortune. When in New 
York, he occupied a position in his father’s bank. 
By matrons he was called a “very sensible young 
man” ; young girls, with vague expressions, admitted 
that “one must respect him,” and brothers described 
him to marriageable sisters as a “good risk.” 

In the library the lamps were lighted: the new- 
comer was revealed. His narrow skull was becoming 
prematurely bald on top; the scalp showed slightly 
through short yellow hair as downy as a baby’s. He 
had small gray eyes, an aquiline nose, a long chin. 
His features were expressionless. Pale and thin, he 
seemed far from robust, though he assured his friends 
that he had entirely recovered from the nervousness 
on account of which he .had been travelling. 

He was sitting in what Nina reminded him was 
“his old chair.” Mrs. Ferrol, while making him a 
cup of tea, remembered that he liked two lumps of 
sugar. Nina, getting him cigarettes, asked him if he 
still smoked that kind. Felix sat staring at him with 
a feeling of resentment. The fellow certainly looked 
very much at home! 

Nina and her mother expressed delight at seeing 
him. So he was going to live for a while in the 


32 


PREDESTINED 


country — right across the way, if one considered 
automobiles! They would be neighbors again. How 
pleasant, especially for Felix, who “must be getting 
tired of women.’ ’ The eyes of the two young men 
met; and Denis Droyt murmured a sympathetic 
phrase regarding Felix’s bereavement. 

“A friend of ours wrote me about it, and said you 
had come out here. By a lucky chance I happened 
to get the letter just before I left the other side.” 

He stayed for dinner. Sitting in the place that 
Felix usually occupied, he entertained the ladies with 
stories of his journeyings. Warmed by their flatter- 
ing attention and enthusiasm, little by little he ex- 
panded in his manner; he blossomed into the tradi- 
tional voyager from afar, the spinner of tales, the 
weaver of enchantments. To Felix he seemed like 
that “universal witness” who is always on hand 
when anything sensational occurs. Had they read 
in the papers a certain bit of foreign news ? He was 
there; he had the right of it. At the German yacht 
races he had seen a royal sloop in collision; he had 
watched a mob burn the betting booths at Long- 
champs; he had happened to be on hand when a 
poor, ruined gambler at Monte Carlo jumped from 
a bridge and dashed himself to pieces on the rocks. 

“Weren’t you horrified?” ejaculated Nina, gazing 
at him fascinated. Looking very cool and brave, he 
answered : 

“Why, not at all. Perhaps it was the moon, the 
strange scenery, and everything that made it seem 
quite like a play.” 


EILEEN 


33 


Felix could hardly repress a gesture of irritation. 
What tales he could have related — of China, of India, 
of Arabia! He felt a great contempt for people who 
retail with gusto the same old stories that every 
excursionist has told. He said, indifferently: 

“Some one kills himself at Monte Carlo every 
day.” 

In the morning, when he awoke, Felix asked him- 
self at once: “What unpleasant thing has hap- 
pened?” And he remembered Denis Droyt. Why 
the devil had he turned up here? Now he would 
be hanging round all the time : everything would be 
different. The farm already seemed less homelike. 

In fact, that was the beginning of a new order of 
living on the hill. 

Every day, if Droyt did not appear in the morning, 
at least he telephoned to make plans for the afternoon. 
Sometimes a note from him awaited Nina at the 
breakfast-table. A groom rode over from his house 
with fruit grown under glass, and orchids. He 
sent her a Virginia hunter to try — one could not 
enter the stable without seeing the beast’s bony head 
sticking over the top of a box-stall. Candy from 
Droyt always lay on the library table. And every 
morning, when she awoke in her white bed, Nina’s 
eyes fell on a writing set of silver that he had bought 
for her in Paris. When he was absent, by a thousand 
such artifices he recalled constantly to her the thought 
of him. His intentions were obvious to every one. 
Immediately on his home-coming he had plunged into 
courtship with tremendous energy. 


34 


PREDESTINED 


As for Nina, her eyes grew brighter, her demeanor 
more alert; she even looked at Felix with a sort of 
suppressed curiosity and eagerness— she was, as one 
might say, “on edge.” It seemed that in person she 
expanded delicately, took on beauty, became radiant 
with swifter blood. She was like a rose unfolding. 
Felix, perceiving the change in her, said to himself at 
last, in amazement: “She is in love with him!” 

At once he felt like an outsider, an intruder. That 
night, after dinner, he told Nina he was going back 
to town. 

They were standing together at an open French 
window in the library, looking across the terraces and 
out into the darkness. She had on a low-neck dress, 
sky blue in color, fastened over her shoulders with 
two narrow bands of blue velvet. Her hair was 
wound round her head in thick braids, like a fillet. 
She wore a turquoise necklace and some finger rings. 
Droyt was expected for the evening; in fact, Nina 
and Felix, while standing at the window, were listen- 
ing for the sound of his automobile. 

For a moment she made no reply to Felix’s an- 
nouncement. She drummed with her fingers on the 
wood-work; then she said: 

“Let’s walk outside.” 

They went out on the terrace. Turning the corner 
of the house, they were enveloped in the shadows. 

The world seemed swimming in obscurity; the 
stars, as if all withdrawn to the very limits of the 
firmament, were hardly visible. From the damp 
earth rose a delicious exhalation — that cool, sweet 


EILEEN 


35 


breath of night in summer which rouses in the heart 
tremulous emotions too delicate for comprehension; 
a longing for unknown ecstasies, desires that one can 
give no name to. 

She slipped her arm through his, “in order not to 
stumble”; leaning against him gently, she kept pace 
with him. As they strolled slowly through the dark- 
nessj stopping now and then to look round them, 
the warmth of her bare shoulder penetrated the thin 
cloth of his sleeve, and from her hair and skin ema- 
nated an odor of powder and sachet. This intimate 
fragrance, this contact in the gloom, caused him to 
think: “If I were only walking so with some one 
whom I loved — who loved me!” What profit would 
he not find, then, in this beautiful night, mute, veiled, 
mysterious, made for lovers! He felt lonely, neg- 
lected, isolated. A profound melancholy descended 
upon him. 

She, for her part, appeared changed: her natural 
exuberance was subdued, all her habitual vigor had 
melted into tender weakness — she had become cling- 
ing, meek, entirely feminine. It seemed that every- 
thing which she perceived to-night was fraught for 
her with romantic meaning. She could turn no 
phrase, about the stars, the obscurity, the enfolding 
hush, without a sentimental intonation. Looking at 
the sky, she quoted, with a sigh: 

“ There we heard the breath among the grasses . . . 

Well contented with the spacious starlight, 

The cool wind’s touch, and the deep blue distance, 

Till the dawn came in with golden sandals. ” 


3 ^ 


PREDESTINED 


“She is thinking of him,” he thought. And per- 
ceiving something indelicate in that revealment, he 
was half angry with her. He imagined that, leaning 
against him with closed eyes, she was trying to make 
herself believe he was the other. He said, shortly: 

“I don’t know much about sandals for this sort of 
wear, but if you stand round in the grass in those 
blue slippers you’ll get your feet wet.” 

She withdrew her arm. Returning to the path, 
they found themselves before the trellises which 
formed the boundaries of the garden. They entered 
there; she wanted to sit down among the flowers. 
Felix wiped a bench dry with his handkerchief. 
Leaning back on it, side by side, they smelled the 
tuberoses. She remarked, dreamily: 

“How sweet they are!” 

Again their heavy fragrance, rising about him, 
made Felix think of the intoxication of a long em- 
brace. He lighted a cigarette, and the aroma of wet 
blossoms was adulterated with tobacco smoke. 

The burning tip of the cigarette cast over Nina 
a vague glow. Her necklace, all its gold settings 
twinkling, gave her an unusual air of dainty artificial- 
ity. Her blue dress, with its smooth silk shimmering, 
made her look unnaturally slender, sleek, and elegant. 
And the arrangement of her hair — which to-night was 
dressed with exceptional fastidiousness — seemed to 
complete the enrichment of her whole appearance. 
As he looked at her, Felix felt a growing astonish- 
ment and a new respect for her. She was almost like 
a beautiful stranger whom he saw now for the first 


EILEEN 


37 


time. He was amazed that he had never before 
realized her worth. He was like a person who, every 
day through a lifetime, has passed by some familiar 
object without noticing its charm, and who may be 
roused to appreciation only by a combination of ex- 
traordinary influences. 

She had said something, but he had not heard her; 
and she was forced to repeat: 

“Felix, I tell you I want your advice.” 

“Ah. Very well.” 

“Shall I marry Denis?” 

He was silent. At last he retorted: 

“Why should you ask me that?” 

“Because I’m not in love with him.” 

He was amazed — then, of a sudden, elated. He 
exclaimed, in a hearty tone: 

“Well, then, don’t marry him!” 

“But I must marry some one.” 

“Marry a man you’re in love with.” 

She drew a long breath, clasped her hands in her 
lap, and asked: 

“Will you marry me?” 

With his cigarette half-way to his mouth, he sat 
as if thunderstruck. She continued, in a voice that 
trembled slightly: 

“I know how that must sound. But I don’t care. 
I won’t let you go back to town without hearing it. 
I wish you could have said it. But you didn’t; so I 
have to. 

“You’re not in love with me, but at least I know 
you’re fond of me. I’d be satisfied with that. I’d 


PREDESTINED 


38 

be happy if I could be sure of having, all my life, 
just your sort of affection, full of sympathy. 

“We know each other so well that I believe we’d 
never have to fear any disillusionment. Just as you 
know all my faults now, I know all yours; but I 
know all your virtues and possibilities as well. I 
think I know your possibilities better than you do 
yourself. I’m so afraid, sometimes, that you won’t 
realize them fully. To think what you could do and 
might miss doing! I want to see you famous some 
day — a great man, honored and respected every- 
where for what you’ve done. Oh, my dear, if I could 
be with you then, and know that I had helped you! 
No one would ever be able to say to me that a woman 
can do nothing.” 

And as she expressed that thought her eyes shone 
through the gloom with the intense desire of an 
aspiring nature to break the chains of a subjective 
sex, to take part in great performances — to be in some 
degree responsible for them. 

He was dazed; he could not believe it. She loved 
him ; she wanted to marry him ; she offered herself to 
him! She, in whom just this evening he had discov- 
ered a personal seductiveness, was pleading to be- 
come his wife ! And in imagining the worth of all she 
tendered him in proffering herself, he was unable to 
avoid thinking also of the fortune that went with 
her. 

He saw himself, in a future transformed and en- 
riched, living without apprehension, assured of every- 
thing. Some day the farm would be his, and the 


EILEEN 


39 


house in town, and a fine income — a larger income 
than he would have possessed if he had not lost his 
inheritance. Nothing was impossible. They would 
live at home in any way they pleased; tiring of that, 
they would travel; no corner of the earth would be 
too remote for them; he even thought of a great 
yacht sailing into every sea. A part of each year 
they might spend abroad, occupying in gay capi- 
tals their own hotel, the sort of hotel he knew of — a 
historic mansion full of splendid memories, built of 
gray stone carved like lace- work, with gables and 
tourelles and noble chimneys, and a great entrance 
doorway where a servant, in white stockings and a 
laced coat, leaned against the jamb. Or they might 
have a villa somewhere beside the blue sea, but no 
ordinary villa. He had seen one, rose-colored, like 
a little castle, smothered in orange-trees and ilex- 
trees, enclosed in labyrinthine gardens; he thought 
that he could work there. For, relieved of all anx- 
iety, how he would work! Every one would marvel 
at him — a rich man gaining so brilliant a name, 
rising so high, when he might have done nothing but 
enjoy himself. People passing by his house would 
look up at the windows. They would point him out 
in public places where, modestly ignoring the atten- 
tion he excited, he would shine, despite himself, with 
the combined lustre of genius and of wealth. He sat 
motionless, dazzled by his thoughts. 

But suddenly his dreams disintegrated. An ap- 
prehension seized him; was he, indeed, only dream- 
ing? He dropped his cigarette, which had gone out. 


40 


PREDESTINED 


He peered through the darkness at Nina. She 
seemed so nearly impalpable that, reaching out his 
hand, he touched her arm. 

“Is it so hard to decide ?” 

She spoke as timidly as if she were offering him 
nothing. 

“How much she must care for me!” 

The thought touched him to the heart. He prom- 
ised himself that he would do everything for her. 
For all that she would bring to him he would repay 
her by making her proud of him. 

When he kissed her he had a soft shock of sur- 
prise; the novelty of that embrace set him to trem- 
bling. In the shadows, among the tuberoses, she 
had suddenly become desirable to him for many 
reasons. He had no difficulty in repeating, over and 
over, with an accent of passion: 

“I love you! I love you!” 

“ Oh, do you, Felix ? ” And, putting her head upon 
his shoulder, she sobbed as if broken-hearted in her 
gratitude. 

It was the clatter of Denis Droyt’s automobile that 
recalled them to reality. Returning to the house they 
met the visitor before the door. 

When Nina informed him that she was going to 
marry Felix he turned pale. A ghastly smile of 
politeness appeared upon his face. He shook hands 
with both of them, re-entered his automobile, and de- 
parted. He had not uttered a word. 

“Poor Denis!” exclaimed Nina. Felix made no 
reply; he was occupied with something more im- 


EILEEN 


41 


portant than commiseration. What was Mrs. Ferrol 
going to say ? 

They found Mrs. Ferrol in the library. Dressed 
in black, she was sitting beside a shaded reading- 
lamp, which illumined with a soft glow her small, 
pale face and her gray hair, arranged in precise 
waves upon her temples. Putting down her book, 
she looked at the two young people with a gentle 
smile. She said: 

“I was hoping so. I’m very glad, my dears. Ah, 
if your mother were here now, Felix!” 

His eyes filled with tears. How everything came 
to him all of a sudden: good fortune, love, and the 
affection of a mother! What had he ever done to 
deserve such kindness and benevolence? 

“How can I thank you?” he stammered. 

“By making Nina happy,” she replied, and dried 
her eyes. 

That night Felix could not sleep. He rose from 
his bed, went to the window, and gazed out. The 
world, he thought, had never looked so beauti- 
ful. 

The moon had risen, the color of the heavens had 
changed — no longer black, it was that serious, noble 
blue which lies in the depths of sapphires. Across 
the sky were spread long, trailing clouds, scarf-like, 
and sewn with pallid stars. In that radiance the 
garden underneath the windows was revealed, its 
gravel pathways gleaming white, its flower beds 
furnished with unnatural, vague hues. The tall 
trees roundabout seemed to be wrapped in silver 


42 


PREDESTINED 


veils; beyond them the hill-tops were repeated like 
the majestic, moonlit billows of some ocean of 
enchantment, until they were lost, on the horizon, 
in the shimmering waters of the sound. All 
things appeared strange, unstable, mystic — as if 
drawing, down the moonbeams, beauty from some 
lovelier world. Flowers blossom in sunshine, hearts 
in moonlight. It was the hour for transports of the 
soul. 

The limpid rays shone down into his eyes; the 
breeze, approaching from afar to a pervasive sighing 
sound, caressed his body. It seemed to him that 
Nature touched him with tender, reassuring hands. 
A great peace filled his heart : he had never known a 
like emotion — that all was well with him; that a 
supreme power, the same which held the stars in 
place, had taken care and would thereafter, if he 
chose, take care of him. Looking up at the heavens, 
he was possessed with the confidence of such as, 
gazing in the night toward those vast, ordered spaces, 
come to imagine clearly a divine benevolence in whose 
existence and persistence they can trust. 

Presently he felt tears rolling down his cheeks. 
How good, how valuable life was; how dazzling its 
promises; how sure, at that moment, its triumphant 
consummation! He would have liked to formulate a 
prayer of gratitude. 

But, since the impulses of youth are rarely devo- 
tional, the desire for prayer, when it comes at last, 
finds one awkward — as if one were struggling to 
speak in a strange tongue. 


EILEEN 


43 


Finally, however, he achieved, at least: 

‘Til pay it back!” 

And he pictured his lifetime nobly spent in that 
requital. 


CHAPTER III 


As soon as his engagement to Nina was made 
public, Felix felt that he could bear no more idleness; 
he wanted to prove at once, to every one, that he was 
worthy of his good fortune. So he said good-by 
to Nina and her mother, full of ambition and op- 
timism, like a young knight about to plunge forth 
into the unknown to find the Holy Grail. He was 
going back to the city, to begin, to make his way, to 
become famous. 

As for the two women, looking at his bright eyes 
and inspirited countenance, observing the new assur- 
ance of his presence, they considered fame as good as 
in his grasp. For them, in that moment, he was the 
young adventurer of all the ages, the hero setting 
out from among idolizing women to win the world. 

Nina drove him to the railway station. She shed 
a few tears on the way, but when, as the train was 
beginning to glide forward, Felix leaned out through 
the open window of the car, her upturned, earnest 
eyes shone clearly. 

“ You’ll telephone to me every morning, Felix ?” 

“Every morning; and write, too. Good-by, 
dear.” 

“Not good-by, Felix!” 

“No, no; that’s right. Not good-by.” 

44 


EILEEN 


45 


The train rushed toward New York. 

The fields, blond with ripening grain, flowed past. 
Acres of cabbages appeared, dull green, their long 
rows, swiftly changing in perspective, suggestive of 
rotating spokes in some vast wheel. Strips of wood- 
land burst out upon the landscape, closed in against 
the track, tired the eye with a fluttering repetition of 
tree trunks, then vanished suddenly, exposing open 
country. Rail fences straggled by as if alive ; a herd 
of dark-red cows were grazing in a pasture which 
appeared to be revolving slowly under them; a dust- 
colored man was tramping toward a dilapidated barn 
that had the look of moving forward at him. A town 
presented itself in an instant, then melted into a blur 
of brick sheds. The earth fell away; the train rat- 
tled over trestles; far below one glimpsed a peaceful 
stream, undulating among willow-trees, upon its 
banks a group of naked little boys who, while they 
stood up and waved their arms, were whisked out of 
sight. Into large meadows came sailing lines of 
boarding covered with gaudy advertisements. The 
sky-line faded from soft green to drab; smoke ob- 
scured the horizon, and beneath it spires, towers, 
chimneys, and high walls showed themselves above 
a confusion of vague roofs. The fields melted; 
houses were clustered everywhere; one saw a row of 
dwellings all made from the same pattern — then a 
dozen rows, and paved streets with lamp-posts. The 
buildings were transformed from wood to brick ; flat- 
houses fled by close beside the train; between them 
white mists, of drying undergarments, flashed for a 


46 


PREDESTINED 


second. The interiors of shabby homes were re- 
vealed as if in a blaze of lightning, and one remem- 
bered, when far past, the woman above her stove, 
the children at a table, the man in a red undershirt, 
the tousled bed. Factories loomed up; behind their 
windows men were moving to and fro amid ma- 
chinery; girls were sitting in long rows, their hands 
all fluttering; steam was escaping over the roofs; 
drays were crowding the streets. The successive 
vistas, compressed, confused, bewildering because 
of the variety of activities they revealed, seemed re- 
duced, finally, to one long blur in monotone epito- 
mizing work. 

While the train sped forward into New York, Felix 
felt closing round him an atmosphere surcharged with 
energy. He was affected by it. He felt so strong, so 
capable, so sure of himself, that already he could see 
the great city offering him homage. 

He went at once to the office of the lawyer who had 
taken him into the woods. Entering a “sky-scraper” 
in Broad Street, he ascended in an elevator to the 
thirteenth floor. In an antechamber, carpeted with 
green Wilton, a youth disappeared with his card 
behind a door, on the ground-glass panel of which 
was painted: “Mr. Wickit.” The door burst open, 
disclosing a room full of mahogany office furniture, 
law-books bound in yellow leather, black tin boxes; 
out strode Felix’s friend, lean, gray-haired, sharp- 
featured, smiling, both hands extended. 

“My dear boy, my congratulations.” And when 
they were in the private office Mr. Wickit added, with 


EILEEN 


47 


a knowing and admiring expression: “To think that 
I ’d lost patience with you for wasting time out there !” 

They sat down for a chat. Felix resented Mr. 
Wickit’s attitude; from it one would have thought 
that they enjoyed a secret understanding. The law- 
yer apparently believed that Felix had deliberately 
gone out fortune-hunting and brought down a fine 
prize. And Felix, with a sinking sensation at his 
heart, reflected: “Just now it would be impossible 
to convince him, or any one else, otherwise. How 
maliciously unfair people are!” He was filled with 
righteous indignation at that thought. He said, 
somewhat stiffly : 

“I came to ask you for some advice before setting 
in to work.” 

“Certainly,” returned the lawyer, smoothing his 
face into an expression of concern. “You’re more 
determined than ever now, I suppose; you don’t in- 
tend to occupy an equivocal position, eh ? Of course 
not. That does you credit; but I knew it would 
occur to you. Well, what did you think of doing?” 

“I’m going to write.” 

“You persist in that idea?” 

Mr. Wickit looked serious. Finally he said: 

“Recently I met Oliver Corquill, the novelist. I 
talked to him about you and the intentions you had 
when we were in the woods. He told me some things 
you ought to know before you rush into that profes- 
sion. We’ll lunch with him to-day, if you’re at 
liberty.” 

“At liberty — to meet Oliver Corquill?” 


48 


PREDESTINED 


To make that acquaintance Felix would have been 
at liberty if he had contracted a conflicting engage- 
ment even with Nina. 

Oliver Corquill, still spoken of as a young man, 
was one of those fortunate writers who are able to 
produce, every year or so, a novel of the sort called, 
in publishers’ parlance, a “best seller.” So accu- 
rately had he gauged the appetite of the reading 
public, that for the mental refreshment he provided 
there was a continual demand. And so adroitly did 
he conceal beneath the surface in his tales an ad- 
mirable art, that professional critics united in ac- 
claiming him. In consequence he enjoyed both 
fame and fortune. 

Felix and Mr. Wickit, dashing uptown in an elec- 
tric hansom, met him in a club-house near Fifth 
Avenue. The novelist was a quiet-looking man at 
whom Felix ordinarily would not have glanced twice. 
His smooth-shaven face was prosaic and illegible; 
his clothes were unobtrusive ; his hair was very short ; 
his whole aspect suggested that he had just stepped 
out of a business office. Nevertheless, for Felix 
everything about him possessed a peculiar distinction. 
The young man thought the face of the celebrity 
remarkable, was impressed by his manner, wondered 
what romance was connected with the scarab pin in 
his cravat, noticed that his collar had pointed tips 
instead of round, and, when Corquill opened his 
mouth, listened with feelings of respect and modesty. 
He could not help looking round the club restaurant 
to see if others observed the company that he was in. 


EILEEN 


49 


At the table, Mr. Wickit, with a genial grin, said: 

“This is the young man, Mr. Corquill, who wants 
to be a writer. I wish you ’d discourage him for me.” 

“I almost wish I could/’ answered Corquill, gazing 
at Felix with a kindly smile that changed his face as 
if a mellow light had suddenly been thrown upon it. 
Then, in reply to the look that expressed Felix’s 
amazement, he explained: 

“I say that because I’m afraid you’d go into this 
business with the popular idea of it. 

“Nearly every one with a good education and 
some imagination has thought that he could scratch 
off at least a story. Very many persons are seduced 
by this belief into contemplating a career in literature. 
Men who have failed in other professions, lonely 
ladies, young girls brimming over with indefinite 
cravings, young men who desire to entrance every 
one with the thoughts that seem to them entrancing, 
all say to themselves: ‘At least, I can write a book.’ 
How do they set about it ? They sit down at a desk, 
prepare some paper, take up a pen, and begin.” 

“Of course,” thought Felix. 

Corquill continued, with increasing animation: 

“They have begun with the popular idea: that 
literature is, of all the arts, the one in which any 
novice can surpass at once. Does a young girl, after 
walking through the Metropolitan Gallery, go home 
and set up a great canvas, expecting to paint a 
picture in the style of Rosa Bonheur ? Does a young 
man, on finishing an inspection of the Elgin Marbles, 
rush off and buy a block of stone, convinced that he 


PREDESTINED 


5 ° 

can carve a Theseus in the manner of Phidias? I 
think not. But the tyro, who sits down at his desk 
and says: ‘Now I shall write a book/ expects to 
astound every one immediately with his genius. 

“What is the result with him? Confusion, irrita- 
tion, anguish at his impotence — he’s lucky if he doesn’t 
think of suicide. Ah, my dear young man, what 
agonies and incoherent, vain hopes are wrapped up in 
the first manuscripts of these poor people! It’s true 
that now and then such things get printed; but just 
as we have enough chromos in the world already, and 
enough papier-mache statuary, so we have already 
enough books made by the misguided souls who are 
not writing, but merely practising at writing. 

“Now, if a young man came to me and said: ‘I 
want to become a writer,’ I should reply to him: 
1 1 presuppose that you have thoughts worth recount- 
ing, so I pass that point by. But are you very pa- 
tient? Are you very industrious? Can you bear 
disappointments, discouragements, defeats? Have 
you an inflexible determination? Then, if you are 
so equipped, this is what I should advise you to do: 
Study every day text-books of literature and the works 
of great writers. Shut yourself in; write; tear up; 
write; tear up; keep nothing — everything you do is 
worthless. Get a position on the best newspaper in 
the country — say, The Sphere — and when you have 
had a million words of yours printed in its columns, 
then write your first book, bring it to me, and I’ll tell 
you whether you will ever amount to anything.’ ” 

Felix sat silent. 


EILEEN 


Si 

Oliver Corquill, watching him, concluded with a 
frank laugh: 

“This discourse is intended for a serious young 
man with high ideals.” 

Felix drew a long breath. 

“Thank you,” he said, in a low voice. 

The novelist, with a polite gesture, promptly ban- 
ished the animation from his face, resumed his illeg- 
ible expression, and went on eating without another 
word. 

After luncheon, when Felix and Mr. Wickit, in the 
lobby of the club-house, had said good-by to Cor- 
quill, the lawyer asked his young friend: 

“Are you still determined?” 

“Perhaps more so. Now I’m going down to the 
editor of The Sphere to ask him for a job. If he’ll 
let me, I’ll begin to-morrow morning.” As he said 
that, Felix could not help feeling proud of himself. 

Mr. Wickit, after a moment’s thought, shrugged 
his shoulders. With a quizzical expression he re- 
turned : 

“After all, what’s the difference? In a year’s 
time — By the way, is this engagement of yours 
and Miss Ferrol’s going to be a long one? If I 
remember, you have less than fifteen hundred dollars 
in the bank?” 

Mr. Wickit closed his eyes, tapped his teeth, then 
sat down at a writing-desk near by. In a moment 
he held out to Felix a freshly blotted check. It was 
for one thousand dollars. 

“Pay it back later.” And the lawyer, smiling 


52 


PREDESTINED 


shrewdly at the boy, looked, with his lean, yellow face 
wrinkled round the mouth, somewhat like a benevo- 
lent old bandit. 

Felix was overwhelmed. “How I’ve misjudged 
him,” he thought remorsefully. He was unable to 
express his thanks to Mr. Wickit— all of whose cynical 
insinuations were excused instantly — in whom Felix, 
at this princely generosity, could perceive only the 
most praiseworthy qualities. A thousand dollars! 
That sum, which a few months before would not have 
seemed at all remarkable to Felix, appeared now like 
a little fortune. When he set out for the office of 
The Sphere , from time to time he patted the wallet 
in his breast pocket, to assure himself that it was 
safe. When he touched it he was fortified; that 
contact with money imparted even to his body an 
exceptional vigor; and he approached his destina- 
tion with the independent bearing of a man who, 
instead of asking favors anxiously, demands them. 

The Sphere , a daily newspaper noted for its literary 
brilliancy, was published in a little, old building of 
discolored brick, which, shabby and insignificant 
amid modern “sky-scrapers,” faced westward on 
the City Hall Park. Delivery wagons and trucks 
laden with great rolls of paper blocked the street 
before it; about its doors swarmed newsboys; and 
on the . narrow pavement pedestrians hurried by, 
jostling, in two interminable streams. 

Felix entered the office on the ground-floor, where, 
behind a long counter opposite the door, young men 
were folding newspapers. 


EILEEN 


53 


“Where can I find the editor?” 

“Two flights!” The youth whom Felix ques- 
tioned jerked his head toward a wooden staircase on 
the left. 

From the second story, where he saw nothing but 
rough partitions and closed doors, Felix mounted by 
a flight of spiral iron steps that ran up through a 
gloomy shaft. He smelled dust, steam, hot metal. 
A persistent, heavy rumbling seemed to make the 
whole building tremble. Suddenly, close beside him, 
downward dropped a freight elevator laden with men 
in grimy undershirts. He was next startled by the 
shrill scream of a circular saw, and, looking below, 
through the interstices of the staircase he perceived, 
as if at the bottom of a well, a confusion of machinery, 
fires, caldrons of molten metal, half-naked figures 
glistening with sweat. People began to climb be- 
hind him; he pressed on. A boy with a handful of 
papers, clattering down the steps, collided with him. 
Three men, descending, waited impatiently for him 
to pass. Finally, he emerged into a large room 
floored with iron plates. Youths in leather aprons 
were rolling ponderous, table-like objects back and 
forth or running about with steaming mats of felt. 
Beyond these a swarm of men were engaged in vari- 
ous peculiar performances. To the left, some, with 
armfuls of metal spools, were walking between lines 
of small, racketing machines. To the right, others, 
wearing eye-shades, were standing before type-cases. 
Ahead, some distance off, among a huddle of desks, 
in a fog of tobacco smoke, reporters in their shirt- 


54 


PREDESTINED 


sleeves were writing, calling out to one another, wav- 
ing above their heads large sheets of paper, which 
boys snatched from their hands and scurried off with. 

Felix, approaching the reporters’ desks, stared 
about him blankly. Nothing was as he had ex- 
pected. He was bewildered by the strangeness of 
everything he saw, and the confusion. With a mo- 
mentary sensation of timidity, he wondered if, in 
coming there, he had not made a mistake. He felt 
that he was doing something exceedingly fantastic. 

He attracted the attention of a young man who 
seemed to be unoccupied. This person had his 
shirt-sleeves rolled up, wore on the back of his head 
a black felt hat, and was puffing at a disreputable- 
looking corn-cob pipe. 

“I’d like to see the editor,” ventured Felix. 

“You’d better wait; an edition is going to press 
now.” 

“In the afternoon?” Felix exclaimed. 

“Ah, I think you’ve made a mistake. This is 
The Evening Sphere office. The Morning Sphere 
is on the floor below. The two staffs are quite inde- 
pendent of each other.” 

“What’s the difference between them?” 

“They publish at midnight; we publish four times 
during the day. Their hours are from noon till 
almost any time; ours are from eight in the morning 
until four.” 

“Indeed,” said Felix, with a more nearly satisfied 
expression. “Then this is the editor I’m after!” 

He found the editor of The Evening Sphere in a 


EILEEN 


55 


box-like compartment somewhat larger than a cup- 
board, at a disordered desk, knee-deep in crumpled 
papers, in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a cigar. The 
journalist was small and delicate, with a gentle face 
and a cautious manner. 

“Mr. Piers?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Take a seat if you can.” 

When Felix had explained his wishes — which he 
did a little as a church-goer repeats a creed the worth 
of which he is beginning to doubt — at once the editor 
looked sad and tired. The newspaper’s staff was 
complete; besides, there was a long “waiting list”; 
the managers even thought of getting rid of a reporter 
or two — they had so many; and so on. Felix, rising, 
without feeling much downcast, prepared to take 
prompt leave. 

“Wait a minute. I’ve not finished,” the editor 
said, staring at him. 

Beginners were a speculation, pure and simple. 
After careful training they might be of some use — 
again, they might not. At any rate, Felix was to 
understand, they were not worth much to a news- 
paper. “A beginner,” gently remarked the editor, 
“would surely not be worth more than fifteen dollars 
a week.” And he glanced speculatively at Felix, 
who happened to be wearing a suit of dark-gray 
English flannel, silk shirt and stockings, chamois- 
skin gloves, and a fine pearl in his cravat. 

Felix, for his part, had conflicting thoughts. While 
fifteen dollars a week did not at once seem to him 


PREDESTINED 


56 

small earnings, since he had never earned a penny, 
he felt an impulse to appear indifferent on that point. 
He took out a cigarette, in order to exhibit as if 
casually his gold cigarette-case; he even wished that 
in some apparently accidental way he could manage 
to display the thousand-dollar check. 

The editor inquired, abruptly: 

“Mr. Piers, are you doing this on a bet or for a 
whim?” 

“I’m doing it because I want to learn to write 
good English.” 

“That’s your object? Well, I will give you fif- 
teen dollars a week. Can you begin at once?” 

“Why, thank you, yes.” 

“Go outside, sir, and sit down.” 

Felix was a reporter. It did not occur to him to 
be elated or surprised at the ease with which he had 
secured that position. With a wry smile, he asked 
himself: “What will Nina say — and everybody 
else?” 

That was the beginning, for Felix, of a new epoch. 
He found himself one of those young men who hurry 
forth throughout the city at the first hint of unusual 
happenings, who pry into everything sensational, who 
are present at all curious episodes, all tragedies, and 
all disasters. Doors opened at his knock, and, half- 
unwillingly, yet fascinated, he peered in at the secret 
lives of strangers. He contemplated degradation; 
he intruded on anguish; in awe he looked down at 
the mysterious masks of suicides and murdered men. 
He made the old remark of all beginners in that 


EILEEN 


57 


business who are sensitive: he had discovered the 
“Human Comedy” — the comedy of human hearts, 
absurd, grotesque, repulsive, terrible. 

In these first days, while hurrying back to the 
newspaper office, Felix would see, as if they were 
before him still, the eyes of the abandoned wife; 
the waxen face of the girl searching for her lover in 
the Morgue; the little children in the squalid flat 
peeping into the parlor at the coffin; the dead man 
sprawling on the ground, his rival’s weapon lying 
near him. Thrilled by his bit of “Human Comedy,” 
Felix would write in a fine frenzy, then hover near 
the copy-readers while they slashed at his pages with 
blue pencils; finally, with a feeling of suffocation, 
snatch the warm newspapers and scan them for his 
story — the story he had made, that fifty thousand 
eyes would see, but which, in its deflated form, he 
could hardly recognize as his. “They’ve cut the 
best part out!” Still, no blue pencil could undo 
the great fact — that he was in print. When, riding 
uptown in the trolley-car from work, he saw men 
glancing at a certain column in The Evening Sphere , 
his heart went out to those readers: they were his 
brothers; he had an almost uncontrollable desire to 
seize their arms, to make them look at him, to say to 
them: “I wrote that!” He cut out everything that 
he got printed and, at night, pasted all his clippings 
in a scrap-book. 

Answering an advertisement in the newspapers, he 
had rented an apartment, furnished, on a top floor in 
West Thirty-second Street. He had there a studio 


PREDESTINED 


58 

with a skylight, a bedroom, and a bath. The place 
— which belonged to a young artist with weak lungs, 
exiled in the Adirondack Mountains — was full of 
imitation “antique” furniture and trivial curiosities. 
Rejected paintings lined the walls; a model’s throne 
stood in one corner; a wooden mannikin leaned 
against the mantel-piece in the feeble attitude of a 
drunken man; and all the useless paraphernalia of 
an ‘ ‘ artistic ’ ’ studio was strewn about . The stomach 
of a terra-cotta statuette was scratched with matches ; 
the top of a tabouret was marked with rings made 
by wet glasses; the chair-arms had been burned by 
cigarettes. Felix, with ingenuous admiration for this 
Bohemian environment, considered himself lucky in 
obtaining such a scene for his performances. 

At night he worked there faithfully, studying liter- 
ature, thinking always of Corquill and the heights 
which that celebrity inhabited. Such was his en- 
thusiasm and determination that he took pleasure 
in seeing little of his old friends — in taking the pose 
of a recluse for art’s sake. When lonely he re- 
peated: “All great men live in themselves while they 
are cultivating fame.” 

Every morning, before he left the studio, he tele- 
phoned to Nina. 

“Good-morning, dear.” 

“ Good-morning, sweetheart. Ten minutes late to- 
day!” 

“ Really? How are you this morning?” 

“Very well; and how are you?” 

Then there would be a pause — what should he say 


EILEEN 


59 

next? Could it be possible that he had exhausted 
every topic interesting at long distance ? 

He spent his Sundays on the farm. Nina always 
met him at the station. When they reached the first 
stretch of deserted road he kissed her. It was always 
at the same spot; and always in just the same way 
she held in the spirited horse, and leaned down tow- 
ard him from her higher seat, her breast pressing 
against his shoulder, her long eyelashes lowered on 
her cheeks, her soft lips slightly pouting. And she 
always wore the same perfume, simple, clean-smell- 
ing. In time, Felix ceased to notice it. 

It was autumn. The countryside was touched 
with that beauty, slightly melancholy, which nature 
has in its final, all but languishing, exuberance. 
Spring, with its soft breezes capable of thrilling 
hearts with strange delights, was now a memory; 
and the presentiment of fall was almost like a pre- 
sentiment of loss. Where was that first ethereal 
elation — that novelty of love among the budding 
flowers? In autumn the foliage on the hills, the 
blossoming of which one greeted with delight, has 
grown familiar. 

All Felix’s first amazement at his good fortune had 
given way to complacency. Nina’s love, Mrs. Fer- 
rol’s affection, the luxurious home in which, every 
week, he took his place he came to regard finally 
as a matter of course. When, on Monday morning, 
he returned to the newspaper office, from the anxious, 
struggling reporters he was distinguished by such an 
air of independence as comes with a conviction of 


6o 


PREDESTINED 


security. He was assured of everything. What had 
he to fear from any one ? 

One day, when he was passing on some errand 
into the vestibule of the Supreme Court House, he 
came face to face with a tall, earnest-looking young 
man in a brown cutaway coat, who exclaimed joy- 
ously : 

“Felix Piers! What are you doing here?” 

This young man’s name was Gregory Tambor- 
layne. He was a lawyer who had been taken into a 
rich firm that safeguarded various large corporations 
in the courts. He was an old friend of Felix’s, but 
for some time, separated by divergent interests, they 
had seen nothing of each other. 

They had an enthusiastic reunion. Each related 
his experiences. 

Tamborlayne had been married for two years; his 
wedding had taken place while Felix was going 
round the world. His wife, after a summer spent 
in Europe, had just returned to him. Felix must 
meet her; he must dine with them — in fact, why 
not that night ? 

Why not, indeed? The lonely evenings in the 
studio were becoming slightly irksome. 

At eight o’clock that night Felix presented him- 
self at Tamborlayne’s house in East Seventy-ninth 
Street. 

The drawing-room in which he found himself 
was rose-colored. Into the walls were set tall panels 
of rose-colored silk covered with a design of little 
garlands. On the waxed parquetry stood chairs 


EILEEN 


61 


and sofas fashioned in the style of Louis XVI, 
their rose-colored upholstery embroidered with 
slight, curving sprays of flowers, their light wood- 
work embossed, fluted, and gilded. Opposite the 
doorway was a fireplace of white marble with a pink 
silk fire screen, in a gilt frame, before it. On the 
mantel-piece stood a round clock supported by six 
marble columns. This ornament was flanked by 
large urns of French china, like the furniture sug- 
gestive of the eighteenth century, with an oval panel 
in the front of each on which was painted a a Mar- 
quise/ J with bold eyes and demure mouth, after the 
manner of Watteau. A mirror, extending from the 
mantel to the ceiling, reflected the massive, globular 
pendants of a crystal chandelier. At the rear of the 
apartment there glimmered in the gloom a beautiful 
harp and a grand-piano, in the same style as the 
furniture — gilded and of chaste outline. The whole 
room, as if reflecting the intimate personality of some 
individual, suggested daintiness, fragility, discretion 
— a discretion that seemed almost to veil an inclina- 
tion toward delicately sensuous extravagances. 

There was a light step in the hall. Here, undoubt- 
edly, was Tamborlayne’s wife. Felix, who had never 
met her, thought : “Now we shall see what he’s done 
for himself!” 

At that moment she appeared in the doorway. 

She was nearly as tall as Felix, slender, pale, with 
black hair. Felix did not think her good-looking, 
but he could not help admitting that she had elegance 
and was exquisitely dressed. 


62 


PREDESTINED 


She wore a low-neck, trailing gown of black lace 
laid on silver tissue, which accentuated the smallness 
of her waist and the slightness of her hips. As she ad- 
vanced with softly rustling skirts, her hair very dark, 
her skin very white, her eyes intently fixed on his, it 
seemed to Felix as if something extraordinary was 
approaching him. Then she smiled slowly. 

“ How do you do, Felix ? — as Gregory always says.” 

His feeling of strangeness vanished; they were 
friends at once. 

Her voice was low and calm, her gestures all were 
leisurely and graceful; everything about her ex- 
pressed tranquillity and self-confidence. Felix ad- 
mired her behavior, the arrangement of her hair, her 
neck, in which, despite her slimness, were no hollows. 
Her clear, smooth skin contained a smothered lustre. 
She was, he thought, an excellent example of what, 
sometimes, he chose to call, with the manner of a 
connoisseur, “the hot-house type” — a type in which 
he took small interest. He had often said emphat- 
ically to other young men: “I can’t bear thin, dead- 
white women.” 

Tamborlayne came in with a hearty greeting. 
Putting an arm round Felix’s neck, he said to his 
wife, whom he called “Eileen”: 

“Now that Fve found him again I’m going to 
hang on to him. What a pity that people lose track 
of each other so easily in New York! Here I’ve 
missed three years at least of this old fellow’s friend- 
ship. Well, we’ll make up for it now — eh, Felix? 
We’ll revive old times. D’you remember the school- 


EILEEN 63 

days? — the scrapes we used to get into? We’ll go 
over it all after dinner. ” 

The young lawyer, somewhat serious ordinarily, 
looked as eager and cheerful as if, in coming across 
Felix, he had done himself a valuable service. 

The dinner-table was decorated with white roses 
and pearl-colored candle-shades. The silver, of 
which there was a large quantity, made a brilliant 
show. There was Venetian glassware beside the 
place-plates, which were covered with gold etched in 
an intricate Persian design. Two English-looking 
man-servants waited on the table. 

Felix remembered that the Tamborlayne family 
had a good deal of money. And he pictured to him- 
self how, when he was married, he would entertain 
his friends no less agreeably. “Just wait!” he 
said to himself. 

It was a pleasant dinner. The wine that Felix 
drank aroused his eloquence and he described wittily, 
with a pretence of whimsical astonishment, his ex- 
ploits in the newspaper office. His becoming a re- 
porter appeared like a mad prank. Tamborlayne, 
laughing enthusiastically, looked like a boy on a 
holiday; but she, gazing steadily at Felix while he 
talked, flattered him more by her slow, compre- 
hending smile. 

Soon after dinner Tamborlayne took Felix off to his 
“ den, ” on the top floor of the house. There, smoking 
pipes, laughing, talking of old times, they managed 
between them to empty a decanter of Scotch whis- 
key. When, finally, Felix rose, it was midnight. 


64 


PREDESTINED 


While he was passing through the second floor on 
his way downstairs with Tamborlayne, she came out 
of a brightly illuminated, yellow room to say good- 
night to him. He was vaguely surprised that she had 
not yet gone to bed. 

“Nearly every afternoon I’m in by five o’clock,” 
she said, in a pleasant, matter-of-fact tone; then 
added: “And Gregory is usually home by six.” 

When she gave him her cool hand he noticed at 
once that she had taken off her rings. 

And as he left the house he imagined her in a 
yellow boudoir, before the mirror of a dressing-table 
covered with silver brushes, vials, and jars, drawing 
her bracelets from her arms, putting on some clinging 
robe of silk, and letting down her thick, black hair. 


CHAPTER IV 


Fall had come to the city. The restricted land- 
scapes of the public squares assumed that gray- 
brown, naked aspect which, at twilight, when win- 
dows brighten in tall buildings roundabout, suggests 
to the beholder sombre reveries. The evening air 
grew chilly; pedestrians moved homeward briskly be- 
neath foggy street lights, and on Fifth Avenue, as 
dusk, like a dun veil of gossamer, was slowly settling 
over everything, an endless procession of fine car- 
riages restored to the thoroughfare a patrician qual- 
ity that it had lacked all summer. The winter sea- 
son — the time of dinners, balls, and operas — was 
approaching. 

Nina and her mother had returned to town. They 
lived, when in New York, on lower Fifth Avenue, 
just north of Washington Square, in one of those 
old brick houses of massive, plain exterior, with Ionic 
pillars of marble and a fanlight at the arched en- 
trance, that preserve unobtrusively, in the midst 
of a city which is being constantly rebuilt, the pure 
beauty of colonial dwellings. 

The place was an heirloom of the Ferrols that had 
been proudly kept for generations in its pristine state. 
Mrs. Ferrol, from being at first but mildly interested 
in this tradition of her late husband’s family, had 
6s 


66 


PREDESTINED 


come finally to regard the house as a sort of ancestral 
monument and herself as its curator. 

The walls were covered with faded silk or with 
“ landscape paper.” From the ceilings were sus- 
pended slender chandeliers on which dangled fringe 
upon fringe of long glass prisms. Beside the door- 
ways, branching candelabra were affixed to oval, 
gilded frames of misty mirrors. The furniture was 
all from the period of Heppel white. And above 
marble mantel-pieces, as mellow as if filled with oil, 
hung large likenesses of simpering ladies and sedate 
gentlemen, in quaint dress and uniform, with obso- 
lete-looking faces. Throughout the house, in short, 
the same “ antique” effect prevailed. The expen- 
sive modern dwellings of the Ferrols’ friends, situ- 
ated further uptown, seemed almost like architect- 
ural parvenus when compared with this place, the 
chaste, faded fineness of which was like that of an 
honorable old aristocrat. 

This formal environment was not, however, of the 
sort in which young men are most pleased to spend 
their time. Felix, who dined nearly every evening 
at the Ferrol house, began to think, on recovering 
from his first enthusiasm, that comfort had there been 
somewhat unreasonably sacrificed to the hobby of 
the family. It was almost impossible to take lazy 
attitudes on the Heppelwhite furniture: the sofas 
were too narrow, the chair-backs too straight. And 
in nearly every room there was a portrait of some 
stiff old gentleman who seemed to follow all one’s 
actions with the forbidding eyes of an arbiter of eti- 


EILEEN 


67 

quette. Felix at last found these surroundings irk- 
some; and he resented secretly the “ ancestor- wor- 
ship” that he held responsible for his discomfort. 

Perhaps, while sitting in the drawing-room with 
Nina after dinner, he would murmur solemnly: 
“This is the chair that George Washington had to sit 
in as a punishment for chopping down the cherry- 
tree’’; or: “This sofa was used in the Spanish 
Inquisition. The question was put to the unhappy 
prisoner; if he refused to answer, he was stretched 
at full length upon this instrument.” He had 
names for all the ancestors portrayed there, which he 
told Nina in private: one, whose face was nearly 
covered with black whiskers, was “The Man in the 
Iron Mask”; another, in Continental uniform, stout 
and rosy, was “The Little Lost Dauphin”; and a 
figure in a large wig, which had almost disappeared 
beneath a brownish murk, Felix called “Adam, the 
Founder.” One evening, when he had been spend- 
ing a couple of hours with some friends in a hotel cafe, 
he stopped on his way to the dining-room before this 
portrait, which he saluted, while asking whether 
“the dinosaurs were still breaking into the garden 
and getting at the fig-trees. ” 

Nina, taking him aside after dinner, reproached 
him with having had “a little too much to drink.” 

They were drawn into an argument, in which 
Felix found himself asserting that one must be agree- 
able with one’s friends, while Nina, growing impa- 
tient, declared that she had no sympathy with such 
a point of view. She liked to think of Felix as dif- 


68 


PREDESTINED 


ferent from other young men. “For her part, she 
was not like those girls who pretend to admire dis- 
sipation.” 

“Dissipation!” 

Felix said something hotly about feminine exagger- 
ation. They were both exasperated. They looked 
at each other indignantly. It was their first quarrel. 

Presently, without kissing her good-by, he left her 
standing motionless in the centre of the drawing-room. 
He did not intend to slam the front door; and when 
it came shut behind him with a bang, for an instant 
he was frightened. Departing in a dull rage, he 
knew that he was at fault; and he was on that ac- 
count all the more angry with her. The next after- 
noon, when he returned, she came to him quickly, 
put her arms round him, and sobbed on his shoulder. 
It was she who appeared mutely to implore forgive- 
ness. His self-respect was restored. Subsequently, 
he felt more assurance than before. 

Nina and Felix, who had agreed not to be married 
until spring, spent many hours planning how they 
should live together. But every week their schemes 
were altered as new ideas came to them ; and finally, 
of all the pleasant modes of life at their disposal, they 
were uncertain which to choose. Their future, in 
which as yet they could discern distinctly no details, 
they contemplated with trustful satisfaction. 

All days were sunny now for Felix; it seemed as 
if the current of good fortune, once having begun to 
flow in his direction, was growing ever fuller. When 
he went about, those who before had given him but 


EILEEN 


69 

vague bows greeted him with kind smiles, stopped 
him on the pavement for a moment’s cordial con- 
versation, called him to the steps of carriages in order 
to shake hands with him. The women of that circle 
in which Mrs. Ferrol lived now turned toward him, 
whenever he encountered them, eyes full of friendly 
interest ; and Felix — who but a few months since had 
felt himself in danger of slipping gradually from the 
gentle world to which he had been born — understood 
that in this feminine attention, concerted and de- 
liberate, lay the assurance of his social future. 

As for Mrs. Ferrol, no one could have been more 
amiable. She sent useful articles to the studio. She 
remembered Felix’s birthday and, that night, had 
on the dinner-table a frosted cake with candles. 
Once, for a week, she dropped mysterious hints, and 
then, when he arrived one evening, the front door 
was opened by a bent, white-haired, withered old 
fellow in sober livery, who quavered : 

“ Master Felix!” 

It was Joseph, Sheridan Piers’s old retainer! After 
the disaster, Mr. Wickit had got him a good position; 
but he had been restless — “ those strangers didn’t 
understand his ways” — and at last Mrs. Ferrol, 
learning of his discontent, had taken him into her 
service. When he saw his young master again, tears 
filled his reddened eyes; he patted Felix on the arm 
and hovered round him with long, rattling: sniffs. 
He had seen the boy grow up from childhood, had 
made him his first wooden whistle, had taught him 
how to fold newspapers into cocked hats. They 


70 


PREDESTINED 


were, both touched by that meeting; for Felix, at 
sight of the old man, remembered, with a flood of 
longing, the lost home. 

He sat down beside the faithful fellow on the hall 
bench. 

“And so you’re a-goin’ to marry Miss Nina? 
Look at that, now! I remember her no higher than 
this, drivin’ her little basket cart in the park, as smart 
as ye please. An’ d’ye still keep up your ridin’, 
Master Felix? Faith, I’d love to see ye on a horse 
again. Remember, ’twas ould Joseph put ye on 
your first pony.” 

“And I’ve got the riding- whip you gave me once, 
Joseph.” 

“No, ye don’t mean it! You’re foolin’ an ould 
man!” 

“I’ll bring it here next time I go riding with Miss 
Nina.” 

And next day, when Felix did so, Joseph cried 
out in his gratitude: 

“Ah, God bless ye, now. To think ye kep’ it all 
this while!” 

In Central Park, where Nina and Felix often rode 
toward nightfall, moist, gray snow, riddled with drip- 
pings from the trees, mantled the undulating ground 
to the edges of the bridle-path, on which the earth- 
colored slush was fetlock-deep, and covered with 
small pools each the shape of a horse’s hoof. Twi- 
light enfolded the cold landscape ; mists lay like long 
scarfs amid the black brushwood of the hollows, and 
through the naked tree tops shone yellow lights, re- 


EILEEN 


71 


mote and faint. Horsemen went splashing by like 
mounted ghosts, each face a pallid blank. Where 
the bridle-path ran under bridges, one saw, leaning 
over the parapets above, indistinct, solitary figures, 
motionless, mysterious. An inexpressible loneliness 
enveloped everything, and even thrust itself between 
the two young riders. Saddened by their bleak sur- 
roundings, they remembered with regret the summer- 
time, their gallops through green lanes — the hot sun- 
shine, the sweet, soft breeze, the sounds of birds and 
bees, and farmers calling in the fields. They were 
unable to reproduce the pleasure of those delicious 
days. 

In the evening, sometimes they went to a dinner 
of a theatre party or the opera. In the darkened 
opera-house there glittered vaguely overhead five 
golden balconies, each full of shadowy spectators 
who, in the topmost gallery, rising in tiers to a height 
that one observed with dizziness, looked like innu- 
merable tiny caryatids supporting the vast golden 
roof. Before the lower edge of the bright proscenium 
appeared the agitated head and arms of the con- 
ductor; and from below him rose the music of the 
orchestra — a pervasive, ceaseless harmony blending 
with the occasional utterances of the singers; a har- 
mony now delicate and winsome, now swelling, at 
the union of all instruments, to extraordinary maj- 
esty. And, on the stage, the lovers, as if exalted 
by the sensuous music that played round them, were 
swept through their sublimated tragedy, wherein, for 
Felix, love had that remote grandeur, with which, in 


72 


PREDESTINED 


his young dreams, he had invested it. Wistfulness 
stole over him, as if he were contemplating some 
unattainable splendor. Then the curtain fell; the 
lights sprang up; people began to talk and move 
about; he saw the conductor blowing his nose; and 
Nina’s familiar face recalled him to reality. 

Now and then, from the opera or the play, they 
went to a dance — in those days they were always 
invited out together; or perhaps Felix was always 
invited then on her account. In large, brilliantly 
illuminated ballrooms, embellished with gilding, fes- 
tooned with hot-house flowers, the music, with an 
arpeggio of muted strings, glided into the languorous 
melodies of waltzes. Here and there upon the pol- 
ished floor appeared in motion two joined figures, 
one in black, one pale and shining. The dancers 
grew more numerous; the floor was filled with them; 
the colors of the women’s dresses formed a gorgeous 
haze. One felt upon the face, in little gusts, warm 
air laden with perfume. One caught glimpses mo- 
mentarily of beautiful women whirling by with half- 
closed eyes, of smooth bosoms powdered white, of 
bare, dimpled backs, of the nape of a neck with a 
loosened curl trembling on it. The strains of the 
violins, the rustling of swirling skirts, and the sound 
of countless shoe-soles turning on wax united in an 
intoxicating rhythm. The music ceased; the dan- 
cers, with the staring expressions of persons emerging 
from a dream, walked slowly toward the gilded 
chairs arranged in rows along the walls. Some men 
made off toward the smoking-room, their long, black 


EILEEN 


73 


legs and coat-tails giving them a grotesque, bird-like 
appearance as they departed. More remained, stand- 
ing in groups, with bent shoulders, before women 
who, sitting with their luminous trains spread out 
beside them, smiled vivaciously over their flutter- 
ing fans. Around the edges of the ballroom ex- 
tended a row of black backs, like a broken hedge; 
and through the intervals between these could be 
seen snowy shoulders, diamonds, roses, twinkling 
dresses. A babble of voices, like the sound of little 
waves breaking on a beach, rose to the frescoed 
cupids floating in panels on the ceiling. 

Such scenes fresh in mind, Felix returned in the 
morning to the shabby newspaper office with some- 
what the sensations of a man who leads a double 
life. He felt that he was superior to that place; he 
longed to finish his apprenticeship there. 

But he discovered presently that his hours of even- 
ing study were being slighted for diversions. When, 
in the small hours of the morning, he returned to the 
studio from some entertainment, he was troubled by 
the sight of his neglected writing-table. Then he 
had a touch of fear at the thought that he was ac- 
complishing nothing of importance. He was filled 
again with virtuous and serious inclinations ; and all 
those careless, laughing people in whose company he 
had amused himself seemed like so many wastrels. 
He had no patience with them! He told Nina ener- 
getically that he was going, thereafter, to work every 
night; she would have to do without his company 
at such times. To his surprise, she was greatly 


74 


PREDESTINED 


pleased. She looked as if her mind had been re- 
lieved of some apprehension. 

Every evening, then, he shut himself in the studio. 
The clock ticked ; the fire crackled ; and on the divan 
the white bull-terrier puppy that Nina had given 
Felix sniffed in his sleep and twitched his legs. 
Felix stared at the little beast, at the pictures on the 
walls, at all the trivial bric-a-brac. With a sigh, 
reluctantly he resumed his reading. “It was not all 
beer and skittles, this studying literature!” The 
sleet lashed the skylight ; the wind howled round the 
cornices. Felix helped himself to a drink of whiskey. 

At his occupation of the studio he had found on a 
buffet an array of dusty glasses and dry bottles. He 
had promptly bought a stock of cigars, liquors, and 
seltzer water for the regalement of visitors. These 
decorations, he thought, added to the room a cosey 
and hospitable touch. Moreover, he found the buffet 
a convenience. He used to “take something” in the 
evening if he was in low spirits, or before going to 
bed, or in the morning, if he felt lethargic. After 
some trouble he had, like most of his young 
friends, at last got so that he could finish a drink 
of whiskey without a grimace. 

When his book wearied him he would walk round 
the room, hands in pockets, always stopping before 
a little, rickety bookcase to stare with an air of dis- 
satisfaction at the volumes on the shelves. He had 
read them all, worse luck! But one night he found, 
behind the rest, another novel, covered with dust. 
It was a historical romance of the middle ages that 


EILEEN 


75 


he had never read. What a relief! He bore the 
novel quickly to his writing-table, sent his text-books 
whirling out of the way, and read of knights, monks, 
damsels, and troubadours till two o’clock in the 
morning. It was a good story — but how much better 
he could have done it! Well, then, why not better 
it ? Remembering Oliver CorquilPs admonitions, he 
snapped his fingers scornfully. The next night he 
prepared excitedly to write a short story dealing with 
the middle ages. 

He could see, as if they stood before him, those old 
fellows in their scalloped coats and armor, those 
ladies with head-dresses, towering like steeples, the 
quaint, mediaeval faces, the eccentric actions of a 
people long since done with. Certainly, no one had 
ever perceived such things so clearly! Sure of him- 
self, he knew how he would make every point effec- 
tive. The phrases took place in his brain as the 
crystals of a kaleidoscope slide swiftly into symmetri- 
cal designs. He was astonished at his capability. 
He believed himself to be inspired. 

As he wrote, his delight increased, his pride rose. 
He threw down the pen, sprang up, and strode about, 
smiling, happy, confident. He talked to the dog, 
who, alert on the divan, watched him with cocked 
ears and open jaws. “Hey, Pat, we’ve begun! 
We’re on the way! We’re going to be famous! Sa- 
lute, you little devil; salute the illustrious author!” 
Pat, springing to the floor, bounded round his master 
with sharp yelps of joy. Felix took a drink, lighted 
a cigarette, and again attacked his work. 


76 


PREDESTINED 


He sent the manuscript to an important monthly 
magazine. One morning, standing by the hall door 
in his pajamas, he tore open an envelope; a check 
fell out; it was for two hundred dollars. The story 
had been accepted. 

Despite his previous confidence, for a moment he 
was stupefied. Then he tingled with exultation. 
Fame lay before him! That morning, in the street, 
passers-by turned to look again at his radiant face. 

The story was published with handsome illustra- 
tions. Nina read it five times. Mr. Wickit, tele- 
phoning to Felix, expressed astonishment and con- 
gratulated him effusively. Gregory Tamborlayne, 
putting both hands on Felix’s shoulders, said, with a 
smile that made him good-looking: 

“Old boy, you don’t know how glad I am!” 

Of all Felix’s friends, Tamborlayne had become 
the closest. He took an intense interest in Felix’s 
progress, talked flatteringly of him everywhere, pre- 
dicted for him a fine future, told people that “there 
was a young man who was going to write the great 
American novel.” They were seen everywhere to- 
gether, arm in arm, swinging their canes, smiling, 
chatting with animation. They confided to each 
other their affairs, and Felix became, for the Tam- 
borlaynes, a “friend of the family.” 

At the close of winter afternoons, when the streets 
grew gloomy and lights, surrounded by foggy nim- 
buses, made deep reflections on the wet pavements, 
Felix liked to enter the Tamborlaynes’ house, warm, 
fragrant with flowers, illumined by the glow of lamps 


EILEEN 


77 


in shades of favrile glass. In the library, lined with 
Japanese leather, full of glistening books and com- 
fortable furniture, he sat, in the attitude of a man en- 
tirely at ease, beside the tea-table with Eileen Tam- 
borlayne, while waiting for her husband to come 
home. 

He took pleasure in talking to her about himself 
— “she was so sympathetic.” She said little; but 
sitting in a deep chair, with a cigarette between her 
slender fingers, she looked at him intently, all the 
while he was speaking, with the serious gaze of a 
person who is listening to something of importance. 
When he chose to be humorous, immediately her 
quiet, appreciative smile appeared to flatter him. 
When, after refreshing himself with the Scotch and 
soda that he preferred to tea, he unveiled a little the 
longings of his heart, so difficult to describe in speech, 
in some way she made him feel just by the expression 
of her face that she understood him perfectly. How 
rare — that ability for exact comprehension! He told 
himself that she was an unusually intelligent woman. 

When he had become thoroughly familiar with 
her appearance it no longer occurred to him that 
she was “too slender” and “too pale,” that her 
fingers were too long, that her feet, in thin house 
slippers were so narrow as to have seemed to him 
at first almost abnormal. 

Sometimes, in answer to his confidences, she made 
little confessions of her own. She, too, had found 
this or that to be the case; and with an air almost 
meek, as if she considered her affairs of small in- 


PREDESTINED 


78 

terest, she would cite as an example some past ex- 
perience of hers. In that way he got to know some- 
thing of her life. 

She had lived in Washington until her marriage; 
Gregory had met her there. She spoke of her former 
home in the capital; it was on such and such a street. 
Her father had been a well-known lawyer — had 
Felix ever heard of him? Felix thought he had. 
She had gone to school at a certain convent. When 
only seventeen, she had nearly married a young man 
who had subsequently turned out badly. And so on. 
Felix listened attentively to these disclosures; but 
afterward, while reflecting on them, he discovered 
invariably, with vague surprise, that he knew no 
more of her real self than he had known before. 
One afternoon, however, she admitted with a sigh: 

“But, you see, I’m twenty-nine years old!” 

Felix would not have suspected it. He was then 
twenty-six. From that moment she obtained, by 
reason of her superior age, a subtile prestige. 

In the midst of their conversations Gregory would 
come in rubbing his cold hands, beaming. 

“Well, here we are again! What’s the good word 
to-day, Felix?” 

And, bending over his wife, he would give her a 
long kiss. Then, throwing himself into a big chair, 
with a tender look at her he would say: 

“How good this is! D’you know, Felix, I rather 
like this old girl.” 

In fact, he was still madly infatuated with her. He 
could not keep away from her; he patted her hand, 


/ 


EILEEN 


79 


or put his arm round her, or drew her into a corner 
to kiss her. When he contemplated her his eyes 
brightened, his serious, plain face wore a look of 
devotion. She received his caresses gracefully, with 
a pretty humility, keeping her eyes cast down for a 
moment after he had embraced her. 

While Felix was generously permitted to be the 
witness of these tender passages, Gregory was less 
demonstrative when other guests were present. 

Occasionally Felix met at the Tamborlaynes’ 
house a thin, stoop-shouldered young man, with a 
weak, “clever” face, eyes that were pale and watery, 
lank, black hair precisely brushed, finger nails cut to 
a point, and dainty manners. This young man’s 
name was Mortimer Fray. In lieu of any serious 
occupation, he was an amateur of all the arts — a 
dilettante. Smoking one cigarette after the other, 
wearing all the while that expression which is called 
“soulful,” he talked volubly, in an excessively re- 
fined voice, of painting, sculpture, literature, music, 
and the drama. His conversation was ornamented 
with such terms as “atmosphere,” “nuance,” “chi- 
aroscuro,” “tonal quality,” “the unities,” “French 
feeling.” Gregory thought him “an interesting chap, 
though a bit effeminate.” 

He had been introduced to the Tamborlaynes 
at an exhibition of paintings. In a moment’s con- 
versation he had recommended to Eileen Tambor- 
layne a new book. A few days later he had tele- 
phoned to ask if he might call and learn her opinion 
of the author. He brought with him a portfolio of 


8o 


PREDESTINED 


etchings, which Mrs. Tamborlayne admired. Fray 
thereupon immediately bestowed them on her. He 
remarked the music on the piano. Mrs. Tambor- 
layne was the musician ? How pleasant ! For his part 
he played the violin a little. One afternoon he ap- 
peared with the instrument — perhaps they might 
run over a piece or two ? He forgot to take his violin 
away with him — it had been covered with sheet 
music — and he had to return for it next day. After 
that there was no telling when he was going to drop in. 

One day he appeared at the Tamborlaynes’ house, 
bursting with pride. He had just made the acquaint- 
ance of Paul Pavin, a famous French portrait-painter, 
who was then in New York executing some commis- 
sions. Fray had managed to lunch with this 
personage, had walked up Fifth Avenue with him, 
discussing art at every step, and on arriving at the 
Velasquez Building, in which Pavin occupied a 
studio, had received an invitation to call “some 
day.” Beside himself with satisfaction, he began 
practising on Eileen Tamborlayne and Felix with a 
host of artistic aphorisms, each beginning with : 

“Paul Pavin said to me.” 

When he had left the house Eileen Tamborlayne 
looked vexed. Staring at Felix absent-mindedly, she 
exclaimed : 

“I wonder if Pavin would let him see ” 

“See what?” asked Felix, in surprise. 

Finally, with a smile, she said: 

“111 tell you something, if you’ll promise to keep 
it to yourself.” And she confessed that she was 


EILEEN 


81 


secretly having her portrait painted by this Pavin, 
as a surprise for Gregory. 

Felix was amazed and delighted. How pleased 
Gregory would be! 

“Tell me about it,” he besought her, eager to take 
part in this amiable deception. How had she come 
to think of it ? How had she gone about it ? 

It was very simple. During the summer she had 
met Pavin in Paris. He had been enthusiastic; he 
had said at once that she was a woman of whom he 
could paint a fine portrait. It was evident that this 
suggestion, implanted in her mind, had grown to a 
strong desire; in her thoughts she had undoubtedly 
perceived her likeness, done by this celebrated artist, 
hanging in an art gallery on exhibition, surrounded 
by admiring critics, talked of everywhere. On 
Pavin’s arrival in New York at once she had given 
him his commission. She had a sitting nearly every 
afternoon. The portrait was beginning to take its 
final shape. 

“If only I could see it!” ejaculated Felix. 

Well, why not, since he was in the secret now? 
It was arranged that he should call for her the next 
afternoon at Pavin’s studio, to meet the artist and 
look at the picture. 

When he presented himself the spacious studio 
was already dusky; at the far end of it a “north 
light ” formed a great square, luminously gray, against 
which some heavy furniture appeared in silhouette 
with blurred outlines. But just as Felix entered 
lights burst forth. 


82 


PREDESTINED 


The bare, high walls were covered with faded 
burlap that had once been gilded. Worn Turkish 
rugs lay underfoot. There were some divans, up- 
holstered with gray cloth, and a dusty grand-piano 
in one corner. Here and there were heavy chairs of 
carved wood. An easel, bearing a large canvas, was 
turned to the wall. Other canvases were piled up 
between two doors, at which hung curtains of gray 
velveteen. There were no ornaments; everything 
was practical ; this studio was a workshop. 

Felix saw Eileen standing by the “ north light, ” 
wearing her hat and fur coat, pulling on her long 
gloves. A tall, broad-shouldered man advanced with 
out -stretched hand. 

The Frenchman was about fifty years old, still 
blond, ruddy, with a great yellow beard trimmed 
square across the bottom. His eyes were shrewd 
and humorous. His hands were the heavy, working 
hands inherited from peasant ancestors; for he was 
not a Parisian born, but a native of the farm country 
of Touraine. In his youth, urged by those whisper- 
ing voices which call some souls from the dullest, 
most unpromising surroundings into electric regions 
where fame may be met, he had set out for Paris. 
There he had lived in a garret, struggling, starving, 
watching a poor sweetheart die for lack of proper 
care, contemplating suicide, cursing the city that was 
cruel to him. Finally, in a frenzy of determination, 
he had plunged through all obstacles — he had got 
fame by the throat. Nowadays he was wealthy, 
renowned, and welcomed everywhere — this son of a 


EILEEN 


83 

Touraine farmer who, as a boy, had tramped cow 
pastures in wooden shoes and, as a student, had de- 
voured stale bread on benches in the public parks. 

Felix took the artist’s hand respectfully. He was 
charmed at once by the Frenchman’s cordiality, his 
precise English, his graceful manners learned through 
long contact with fashionable people, his way of 
implying constantly: “You and I, as men of the 
world, can understand.” Felix’s satisfaction knew 
no bounds till they went to inspect the portrait. 

The portrait was life-sized. Eileen Tamborlayne 
was pictured standing in a black ball dress covered 
with black spangles and with jet. Enveloped in 
shadows, with her back half turned, she was looking 
over her shoulder at the observer, while parting with 
one hand some indistinct curtains in the background. 
Her slimness and pallor seemed to have been exag- 
gerated by the artist; her lithe grace was nearly 
caricatured. The face, which still appeared in flat, 
unfinished tones, wore a look which Felix thought 
unnatural. He considered the portrait exceedingly 
bizarre. He was sure that Gregory would not like it. 

But, reflecting that he might betray ignorance by 
any adverse criticism, he said nothing, when he and 
she left the studio, except that the picture was “very 
odd — quite striking.” With a pleased expression, 
she agreed with him. 

The thought of sharing the secret of the portrait 
fascinated Felix. Whenever he passed the Velasquez 
Building he looked up at the windows intelligently. 
One afternoon, unable to withstand his curiosity, he 


PREDESTINED 


84 

returned to Pavin’s studio. She was there, and had 
just finished her pose. While smoking and talking 
with the artist, he heard her, behind the gray cur- 
tains, in another room, changing her dress. Silk 
rustled; silver clicked against silver; presently she 
emerged ready for the street, with a tranquil, demure 
air and a business-like word to Pavin regarding her 
next visit. Felix could not help finding in the whole 
affair something adventurous and daring. He won- 
dered whether Gregory, if he had known, would have 
appreciated all this exertion for his sake. 

Half assured of a welcome by the Frenchman’s 
cordiality, Felix began timidly to visit Pavin. The 
artist was pleased; he seemed to have taken a fancy 
to the boy. He said : 

“When the light holds good, I work; the door is 
locked. When the light goes, I have an hour to lie 
about and smoke. Come then. I like you, Mon- 
sieur Felix. You have something that attracts me. 
You refresh me. I remember the time when I, too, 
was young. I have a souvenir. Of myself? Of 
some one else? Who knows? But I seem to see 
Paris thirty years ago, the Paris that is gone, that 
we oldish fellows sigh for. Come always at dusk. 
I shall enjoy it.” 

Felix was overwhelmed with pleasure at this 
condescension. His manner was more dignified for 
days; he could call himself the friend of a great 
artist ! 

Sitting together in the twilight, they talked, as if 
almost of an age, of Paris, of beautiful things every- 


EILEEN 85 

where, of life, and finally, as was inevitable, of women. 
Of women Paul Pavin had his own ideas. 

“They have their place, a charming place — yes; 
but it is not in art. They are a distraction. And 
what is a distraction ? A detriment — not so ? Sup- 
pose I am alone in life ? I work with all my brains 
and energies. Suppose a woman enters and be- 
comes indispensable ? All is confusion. When there 
is a woman, of what are you thinking? Your work? 
Not possible. Your work is her rival, her enemy. 
So, she is my enemy. When my work is done, yes, 
then perhaps I meet the enemy; but I recognize her 
for what she is ; I am on guard ; she makes no wound ; 
she does not occupy my castle.” 

“But,” Felix ventured, thinking of Nina, “I have 
always thought that the inspiration of one good wom- 
an, the companionship of a lifetime ” 

“One for a lifetime? Believe me, mon ami , as 
I have found it, human beings are not like that!” 

Felix was impressed. But sometimes, when there 
was a light knock on the door, he could not help 
exclaiming, with a laugh: 

“The enemy!” 

For women came frequently, late in the afternoon, 
to Pavin’s studio. 

They were all attractive and well dressed, their 
hats laden with trailing feathers, soft furs wrapped 
round their necks, the fingers of their tight gloves 
swollen with rings. They brought in with them 
faint odors of perfume, dropped their gold purses 
anywhere, and seated themselves in the carved chairs 


86 


PREDESTINED 


with exaggerated primness. They all seemed to 
regard Pavin with respect, and to consider it a privi- 
lege that they were permitted to visit him. 

Of these casual visitors, Felix remembered two 
particularly. One, called Miss Sinjon, was a slight, 
red-haired girl, with a square chin, rather prominent 
cheek-bones, and a translucent skin. The other, 
named Miss Llanelly, was tall, red-cheeked, with a 
vivid appearance of healthiness. These two always 
came together. Felix gathered from their conversa- 
tion that they were, from time to time, “on the 
stage.” He had never heard of them before; but 
their faces seemed familiar to him. 

Pavin treated all these fair guests with the good- 
natured tolerance of an old bachelor on whom a lot 
of spoiled children are imposing. But there was one 
visitor — who, as it happened, never met the rest — 
for whom there was invariably a hearty greeting, a 
chair proffered instantly, a bustling hunt for the 
coffee-pot. This visitor was Mme. Regne Lodbrok, 
a noted dramatic soprano, engaged for the winter 
season at the Metropolitan Opera House. 

She was a beautiful Scandinavian, about forty-five 
years old, with pale-yellow hair and a majestic figure. 
Gay, abrupt, frank, she had the good spirits and the 
direct manners of a big boy. When she laughed, she 
threw back her head and opened her large mouth, 
disclosing all her fine teeth. As Felix said to him- 
self, she “filled a chair comfortably.” Sitting beside 
the lamp, drinking cup after cup of coffee, she talked 
to Pavin as one man talks to another. They had 


EILEEN 87 

known each other for years in Europe; each respected 
the other ; they were good friends. 

She liked Felix at once. Whenever, on entering, 
she saw him there, she called out to him, in a jolly 
voice : “ Hello ! ” Sometimes, instead of shaking hands 
with him, she pinched his cheek. Once she called 
him “ liebchen ” — then laughed heartily at his embar- 
rassment. She had a wholesome, motherly way of 
smiling at him, which made him feel very young. 
He admired her, and was proud of knowing' her. 
This contact with artistic celebrities made him feel 
important. 

One afternoon Mme. Lodbrok was sitting at the 
piano with her fur hat on and her gloves rolled over 
her wrists. She was about to hurry off to an early 
dinner; that night she was going to sing Venus in 
“Tannhauser.” As her strong fingers touched the 
piano keys at random, she gazed round the studio. 
Her eyes fell on the easel. 

“Tell me, Pavin, that portrait of the pale lady; 
when will it be finished ?” 

Pavin rolled the easel out from the wall. 

“It was finished yesterday.” 

They all stared at the picture — Pavin thoughtfully, 
Mme. Lodbrok intently, Felix with secret disappoint- 
ment. 

He had been right, he thought: it was nearly odd 
enough to suggest caricature. Yet the pose was ex- 
ceedingly graceful ; the very attenuation of the figure 
did no more than emphasize Eileen Tamborlayne’s 
peculiar, lithe elegance; and the general effect, as the 


88 


PREDESTINED 


white skin and shimmering jet showed through swim- 
ming shadows, was of richness and distinction. Af- 
ter all, it was the face with which Felix found himself 
dissatisfied; for he seemed to see there her habit- 
ual expression of placidity and meekness subtly 
caricatured. 

Mme. Lodbrok exclaimed emphatically : 

“It is wonderful! How did you ever catch it?” 

And, after a pause: 

‘ ‘ What did she say, this lady, when it was finished ? ’ ’ 

“Well,” answered Pavin, with a smile, “she said 
yes, that it was beautiful, but that she was afraid her 
husband, who was not artistic, would tell her: ‘I do 
not know this woman.’ ” 

Mme. Lodbrok, while staring at the portrait, was 
playing softly, on the treble keys, the Venusberg 
music. She opened her mouth, closed it — then, with 
a shrug, remarked : 

“So? Well, then, that much the worse for him!” 

And in the ensuing silence slowly striking three 
chords, she sang in a rich, vibrant voice, which filled 
the room, the first utterance of Wagner’s Venus : 

“ Geliebter, sag\ wo weilt dein Sinn” . . 


CHAPTER V 


One afternoon, at dusk, Felix met Eileen Tambor- 
layne on Fifth Avenue. She had been shopping; she 
was tired and thirsty; and she wanted a cup of tea. 
They entered a hotel near by, and in a tea-room full 
of potted plants, where one was likely to meet any- 
body, sat down at a table. 

It was the first time since his engagement that 
Felix had appeared in a public place with any woman 
except Nina. Ill at ease, he kept looking at the door- 
way, where new-comers were continually appearing. 
He expected every moment to see Nina standing there 
and staring at him. 

He was exasperated at the leisurely manner in 
which Eileen Tamborlayne sipped her tea and nibbled 
cakes. When she had finished, he thought she would 
never get her gloves buttoned and her veil arranged. 
She mislaid her purse ; they looked for it everywhere ; 
the waiter moved several fern pots and crawled under 
the table on his hands and knees. At last she found 
the purse in her muff. Felix rose quickly, with a 
sensation of intense relief. But where was her pack- 
age ; she was sure she had brought in a little package. 
Felix was sure she had not. The waiter agreed with 
him. Finally, she started toward the door. 


9 ° 


PREDESTINED 


In the doorway Felix came face to face with Miss 
Llanelly, the tall, red-cheeked girl he had met in 
Paving studio. As soon as Eileen Tamborlayne was 
past her, Miss Llanelly smiled and nodded. 

This, also, irritated Felix. He thought: “If Nina 
were with me, she would do just the same!” And 
suddenly he was afraid of her, and of all the other 
women he had met and chatted with in Pavin’s 
studio — and not only of them, but of Eileen Tam- 
borlayne as well, whom, through some instinctive 
reticence which he could not explain, he had never 
spoken of to Nina. His eyes were opened; he had 
been treading on dangerous ground; he had been 
risking a great deal for nothing. What incompre- 
hensible rashness had he not been guilty of! 

A sudden apprehension is an excellent incentive to 
good resolutions of a sweeping character. He re- 
solved not to go back to the Tamborlaynes , house or 
to Pavin’s studio; he determined to avoid Eileen 
Tamborlayne thereafter; and as for the Miss Lla- 
nellys, whenever they got in his way he would look 
straight through them ! He had obtained all at once, 
through trepidation, some high ideas of the obliga- 
tions of an engaged young man. 

When he set out that evening for the Ferrol house, 
he had a refreshing sensation of honesty, as if, at his 
resolution, all his past faults had been obliterated. 
When, on entering the old-fashioned drawing-room, 
he saw Nina waiting for him, he was touched with 
remorse at the sight of her clear, trustful eyes, and 
he embraced her with a tenderness so unusual that 


EILEEN 


9i 


she was surprised. His quiet evening with her de- 
lighted him. He had no thoughts but sincere and 
simple ones — no wish but to repay her for her con- 
stant faith in him. Then, rediscovering her beauty, 
he recovered a good deal of his old ardor. As he 
was leaving her, she put her arms round his neck, 
gazed up at him with shining eyes, and whispered : 

“What a dear boy you are to-night!” 

The next day Felix began to devote all his leisure 
hours to Nina. They rode in the park; they took 
long walks, with Felix’s puppy trotting at their heels; 
they strolled through streets full of furniture shops, 
looking into the show windows at draperies of crimson 
damask and brocade, at carved Italian chests, at tall 
chairs fashioned like the thrones of cardinals, at 
tables the heavy legs of which were carved with post- 
uring cupids, at four-post bedsteads, with wood- 
work fluted and gilded in an antique style, large 
enough to conceal a family behind their curtains. 
They planned the decoration of a dwelling of their 
own. Alert, with ruddy cheeks, they returned to the 
Ferrol house for dinner. Old Joseph, opening the 
door for them, was wreathed in smiles. 

Felix now found a novel pleasure in perfecting his 
behavior. He seemed to have experienced an inten- 
sification of conscience; and, somewhat like a con- 
vert to religion who, in his burst of zeal, will be con- 
tent with nothing less than asceticism, Felix, day by 
day the more enamoured of his pose of rectitude, was 
always hunting for fine resolutions to make. He even 
drank nothing, for a while, but a bottle of light beer 


92 


PREDESTINED 


with his luncheon ; for a week he kept down his allow- 
ance of tobacco to. “three smokes a day.” In such 
mortifications he discovered a subtle voluptuousness: 
when his appetites presented themselves to him he 
enjoyed anticipation. As he reflected that there was 
nothing in his conduct with which anybody could find 
fault, feelings of calmness and superiority pervaded 
him. While walking through the streets he gazed 
on passers-by with the gentle tolerance of an exem- 
plary character. 

He worked hard. At the newspaper office his 
salary had been raised to twenty-five dollars a week ; 
at home he had begun to write a novel. 

After perusing several books of Tolstoy’s, he had 
decided to write a Russian story in the “realistic 
style.” Having been in Russia, he was sure of his 
ability to concoct the “atmosphere.” He had visions 
of tall, bearded gentlemen with close-clipped hair, in 
uniform, smoking cigarettes; of pale ladies with pen- 
dent ear-rings, sitting in overheated rooms ; of frowsy 
peasants in boots and quilted coats; of mobs, cos- 
sacks, three-horse troikas driven breakneck through 
snow, lonely steppes all white in moonlight — a string 
of political prisoners tramping in the middle distance. 
He had begun to write with energy, inscribing at the 
top of the first page, with a flourish, “Chapter I,” 
and immediately introducing his hero with the words : 

“Tchernaieff drew rein and listened. He thought 
he had heard, coming across the snow-covered 
steppes, a faint cry of distress.” 

Unfortunately, while composing this tale he read, 


EILEEN 


93 


by way of recreation, some novels of Alexandre 
Dumas. When he had scribbled thirty thousand 
words Felix discovered, on glancing over a “ Critical 
Study of French Authors,” that he had been writing, 
not in the realistic style, but in the romantic ! Imme- 
diately he tore up his work and began again. But 
the realistic style was elusive, as he was then perusing, 
for amusement, a story of Nero by Sienkiewicz. The 
Russian steppes began to seem to Felix artificial, like 
scenery in a theatre ; and whenever he contemplated 
his Slavonic hero, he had difficulty in not picturing 
him in a toga virilis. Perhaps, after all, he would 
have done better with a tale of Rome! And he 
remembered his thrills of imagination in the Forum, 
the Roman museums, and Pompeii. He saw the 
ancient streets, narrow, precipitous, dirty, and, mov- 
ing through them, the triumph of some returning 
general — the brown crowd leaning out from roofs 
and windows, the soldiers marching in brass and 
leather, the golden eagles, the rising incense smoke, 
the dropping flowers, and, against a background of 
innumerable helmets, all glittering, as if in one of 
those radiant mists which enveloped — so one reads 
— the presences of pagan deities, the conqueror in his 
chariot, robed, crowned with laurel, his face covered 
with vermilion, splendid and terrible, like a god 
showing himself to men. The harsh trumpet blasts, 
the rumbling “Alala!” of the Roman legionaries, 
filled Felix’s ears. 

Late one afternoon, while sitting at his writing-, 
table, staring disconsolately at the manuscript in 


94 


PREDESTINED 


which he had lost interest, he heard a murmur of 
voices in the hall, a rustle of skirts, then a knock 
on the door. The puppy rushed forward, barking 
frantically. It was Eileen Tamborlayne with two 
woman friends whom Felix did not know. 

They had been passing through Thirty-second 
Street; Eileen Tamborlayne had remembered his 
address, and, seeing the studio windows illuminated, 
she had brought the others upstairs “for a lark.” 
Smiling as if she had last seen Felix the day before, 
she explained: 

“There were so many of us, we thought our visit 
could hardly be improper.” 

In fact, the three women seemed to fill the studio. 
One sat on the divan, another on the model throne; 
Eileen took his chair before the writing-table. Their 
elaborate hats and dresses, their glossy furs and 
shining purses, enriched the room. When they all 
jumped up together to examine some object, their 
skirts swished about their slim figures, their perfumes 
sweetened the air, the feathers on their hats com- 
mingled; and Felix, despite his vexation, could not 
help feeling a certain complacency. He noticed that 
neither of Eileen’s companions was as attractive as 
she. 

They thought the place “delightful — so Bohe- 
mian!” They petted the dog, laughed at the man- 
nikin, stared at the skylight, the buffet, the bedroom 
door. They wanted to know if they were intrud- 
ing; they implored Felix to be frank; was he ex- 
pecting any one? He was not expecting any one. 


EILEEN 


95 

He brought out the teapot and telephoned for some 
cakes. 

As they were leaving, Eileen said to Felix, gently: 

“We miss you uptown at tea-time nowadays.” 

“I’m working very hard.” 

“So Gregory tells me. But you need some recrea- 
tion. You’d better drop in now and then and save 
me from Mortimer.” 

“Fray, you mean? He’s there often?” 

She made a grimace of weariness. 

“And the portrait?” 

“It came home last night — Gregory’s birthday.” 

“And Monsieur Pavin?” 

“He was asking after you.” 

As the women descended the stairs with back- 
ward glances and laughter, Felix, leaning over the 
balustrade, smiled politely. When they were out of 
the house he slammed the studio door. 

“Good riddance!” he ejaculated, with every ex- 
ternal evidence of satisfaction — because that, he felt, 
was what he ought to say. But he did not deceive 
himself. He sat down thoughtfully. 

So she had not forgotten him ; she had missed him 
all these afternoons! Indeed, she had liked him well 
enough to hunt him up. He recalled the hours he 
had spent in the Tamborlaynes’ dim library; he re- 
membered the silences, broken only now and then by 
speech, as he sat with her at the tea-table, waiting 
for Gregory to come home and sometimes wishing 
that he might be late. And he was sad, feeling that 
something unique amid the experiences of life had 


PREDESTINED 


96 

receded from him, or as if he were walking slowly, 
with backward looks, away from an undiscovered 
country upon whose borders he had hovered, nearly 
tentatively, for a little while. 

“Ah, it’s just as well I left off going there. In 
the end, I might have made myself unhappy — who 
knows ?” He said this without surprise, or any con- 
demnation of himself. For there had stolen over 
him such sweet melancholy as, while softening the 
heart, renders the mind defenceless before all wander- 
ing thoughts. Sitting in the chair that she had occu- 
pied, he looked about him at the room, which seemed 
in some way changed; and the faint perfume that 
lingered in the air was somewhat like a seductive, 
incorporeal inhabitant. 

The clock struck; it was time to dress for dinner. 
He rose, went to a mirror, and contemplated his 
reflection. He discovered on his face an expression 
of profound ennui. “ How monotonous life is ! . . 

She returned, in a few days, alone. 

She made no excuse for her intrusion. Dropping 
her furs beside his manuscript, she sat down in his 
chair with the declaration: 

“I’ve been standing in a dressmaker’s shop all 
day. I’m just worn out! Can you let me make 
some tea and give me a cigarette?” 

She looked so tired, pale, and meek that Felix 
felt his uneasiness slipping from him. He found 
himself making solicitous remarks. With a shrug, 
she answered, in the tone of a martyr : 

“A woman has to wear clothes.” 


EILEEN 


97 


As usual, she was dressed in black. Everything 
about her was exquisite; and the precise undula- 
tions of her thick, black hair, together with the large 
pearls which she wore in the full lobes of her ears, 
seemed to be trying to counteract, with an effect of 
dainty sophistication, her habitual demureness. Felix 
thought that she was better looking than formerly. 

She talked of Gregory: he did not seem well; he 
was becoming nervous and despondent. “They’re 
working him too hard. A young man in a big law 
firm never has a moment’s rest, it seems. And as 
for you, I think you’re overdoing it, too.” She 
glanced at his writing-table with an expression of 
dissatisfaction. 

Then, after a pause, she asked: 

“Did you mind my bringing those two women up 
here? You wouldn’t if you knew what they said 
afterward. I wonder if I ought to tell you?” 

She pretended to think better of it, insisting that 
their remarks would make him vain. He urged her 
to go on. At last, laughing, she said: 

“They thought you were the sort of young man 
that a woman could fall desperately in love with.” 

“What nonsense!” he exclaimed, much flattered, 
nevertheless. And his reserve slowly melted in the 
glow of gratification that stole over him. 

Presently they found themselves talking quite as 
formerly ; the familiar silences of those other evenings 
sealed each fragment of discussion with the mark of 
intimacy. The window-panes grew black ; the lamp- 
light made amber patches on the glass; and in the 


9 8 


PREDESTINED 


quiet, she sat motionless, with eyes pensively down- 
cast, her pale face and slender figure forming within 
the wings of the deep, crimson chair a charming 
picture of repose. Upon the skylight rain began to 
patter; and at that sound Felix, in the warm, cosey 
room, had a sudden pang, half sad and half delight- 
ful. His voice took on, for one moment, a fuller and 
more tender intonation which surprised him. Her 
lowered eyelashes fluttered ; a faint color stole across 
her cheeks ; her whole person seemed to stir, though 
almost imperceptibly, as a flower stirs at the slightest 
breath of a caressing breeze. 

They had begun by talking about Gregory. But 
finally, progressing in their conversation through the 
subjects of marriage and of married life, they found 
themselves discussing love. 

“Why is it,” she was saying, “that love is almost 
always described to us in such flattering terms, as if it 
were a state of perfect happiness? For my part, I 
think there is little happiness in it, if happiness is the 
same thing as contentment. In love we are forever 
longing for something that can never be attained. 
We reach out for what we desire, we seem to seize it, 
for a moment we think we have it safe; but we find 
that we haven’t — that it has escaped us.” 

Felix, scarcely understanding her, expostulated 
gently : 

“But how can any one say that, who is as happily 
married as you are?” 

“Am I?” she returned, raising her eyes to his. 

He made a gesture of astonishment. 


EILEEN 


99 


“I could hardly imagine a more nearly ideal home 
than yours. Gregory is devoted to you absolutely.” 

“Oh, yes,” she assented indifferently, and added, 
with a little bitterness: “His devotion is complete, 
and consequently it is always the same. It would 
never occur to him to be impatient with me — to show 
jealousy or anger or brutality. In his treatment of 
me he is perfect. Perfection! Is there anything so 
monotonous?” 

Leaning back, she closed her eyes wearily. Her 
pale eyelids looked transparent. 

“If he would only fly into a rage at me some day! 
If he would only hate me for an hour! I have even 
said, if he would only strike me! Then I would 
know that he, too, had somewhere in him violent, 
irresponsible impulses— that he was no better than I.” 

Felix uttered, sharply, an incredulous laugh. 
Amazed, secretly agitated, he stared at her face, 
which he had come to think of as a living symbol 
of tranquillity. 

“Violent, irresponsible impulses in you? I have 
never seen you moved by anything,” he said. 

Her eyes opened. Looking at him intently, she 
retorted, in an even voice: 

“And yet, merely at the chance touch of another 
man, I have felt weak all over.” 

Silence fell, a silence more dangerous than speech, 
in which Felix sat incapable of motion or of utterance, 
like one of those neurotic unfortunates before whom 
in a flash a suicidal thought presents itself, and who 
become immediately like birds fluttering before a 


100 


PREDESTINED 


serpent, fascinated by the very peril contained in 
their imaginings. 

The clock struck; it was half-past six. 

“I shall be late,” she said quietly. And after a 
while she rose. 

He helped her to put on her coat. 

“Tuck in my sleeves.” 

Her eyelashes dropped; she bit her lower lip. 
Then at last she gazed straight at him with humid, 
misty eyes, her mouth relaxed in a weak, tremulous 
smile. 

He took her in his arms. She turned her face away. 
He kissed her ear, her hot cheek, her eyelid wet with 
a tear, her lips. At once she became limp and clung 
to him. And all the while, as if in a dream, he kept 
repeating to himself: “This is terrible! This is 
terrible!” 

He was caught. From that evening, amid his 
most poignant desires for recovery, he felt in the bot- 
tom of his heart a subtle sense of hypocrisy. Like a 
man who, while passionately reiterating a desire to be 
rid of some habit which is ruining him, cannot help 
remembering the enticements of that habit, so Felix, 
crying out to himself, “If only I could return to where 
I was before!” found himself in the same moment 
thinking, with rapt attention, of that from which he 
told himself he wanted to be free. He seemed to 
see, opening before his eyes, such a region as was 
revealed at a talismanic utterance to those advent- 
urers of the Arabian Nights: a strange region unut- 
terably alluring, wrapped in rich shadows and in 


EILEEN 


IOI 


tinted mists through which glittered heaped-up treas- 
ures, guarded by motionless, armed images that 
might, and might not, stir into life at the foot-fall 
of the explorer. 

Sometimes, in a sudden access of strength, he bound 
himself with resolutions, and for an hour or two — 
perhaps a day — felt safe. But then, when he un- 
locked the studio door, he found lying on the floor 
a note from her; or the bell of his telephone com- 
menced to ring ; or he heard a foot-fall on the stairs. 
At these sights and sounds, invariably he was startled. 
As for his condition when she herself appeared, it 
came to pass, at length, that she could not cross the 
threshold of the studio without his good resolutions 
beginning to slip from him. 

Now she would enter with wide eyes and parted 
lips, perfectly pale, with the look, almost tragic, of a 
person before whom all obstacles are ineffective. 
Again she would arrive melting, tremulous, ready 
to burst into tears, half incoherent, swearing that 
this was the last time she would ever see him. What- 
ever guise she came in was sufficient; he could not 
resist her; she dominated him. He was filled with 
an amazement always fresh at the sight of this ele- 
gant woman — so tranquil, so cold, apparently so 
unapproachable, before the world — exhibiting just 
for him these uncontrolled emotions. 

The studio became a place of memories— one of 
those spots impregnated with the essential personality 
of an absent one, into which it is impossible to pene- 
trate without succumbing to a flood of reminiscent 


102 


PREDESTINED 


reveries. When he entered in the twilight the very 
air of the room recalled her to him; and when he 
turned up the lights all the objects about him were, 
at first glance, nothing but souvenirs of her. In the 
crimson chair he seemed to see her sitting, head 
pressed against the wing, a strand of her thick hair 
caught and spread out against the rough-woven 
fabric. On the old couch by the window — where 
she reclined occasionally, while he sat beside her on 
the ottoman — shadows contrived now and then amid 
the tumbled cushions the vague simulacrum of a 
slender figure clothed in black. Even the ticking of 
the clock reminded him of her exclamations of dismay 
and petulance, when it was time to go. She called 
the clock “our enemy,” and, like an adroit enemy, 
it always caught her unawares. “Six-thirty? Good 
Heavens, it was only a moment ago that I came in 
that door!” She noted the passage of those hours 
with the qualms of a miser who is forced to spend his 
gold. 

When she was departing, all his contrition would 
return to him at her stereotyped cry: “How can I go 
back?” For, perceiving from the first how much, 
at such times, he took his frailty to heart, she, too, 
was lavish with evidences of remorse. Accurately 
her self-reproach kept pace with his, so that he be- 
lieved she paid, in after-thoughts, as heavily as he. 
Together they marvelled gloomily at their condition ; 
they said to each other: “If only we had never met! 
It must have been fate!” Between them they man- 
aged to weave, in time, that fabric of excuse with 


EILEEN 


103 

which persons in their position try to veil their fault ; 
some influence more powerful than their wills had 
done this; they were not responsible — rather, they 
were to be pitied. 

There were days when he felt that he could bear 
no more duplicity. He confessed his inability to 
leave her, but declared that he should no longer face 
the trustful eyes of those he was deceiving. Excited 
to a state in which nothing seemed extravagant, he 
cried : 

“We can go away, anywhere, to the end of the 
world ! They will never forgive us ; we shall always 
be hated; but what difference does it make? We 
shall have each other!” 

And in thinking of a life in some remote country 
with this woman whom now he could not do without, 
the familiar city receded to the horizon of his con- 
sciousness — became impalpable, like a mirage — and 
in the faces of Nina and of Gregory, as they appeared 
before him in diminished form, he could not recognize 
the features. 

But at such outbursts invariably her eyes widened, 
a look of reserve and caution flickered in her face, and, 
without stirring, she seemed in some way to retreat 
from him. Then, comfortingly, nearly as if talking 
to a child, she whispered: 

“Calm yourself. Have patience. Wait.” 

She was far-seeing. 

He became accomplished in evasions, skilful in 
lies, which accumulated till his whole existence was 
enmeshed in falsehood. Deception seemed to him, 


104 


PREDESTINED 


after all, an art learned very easily; and he went on 
mastering it with increasing confidence, sometimes 
lost in astonishment at the facility with which he 
hoodwinked every one. 

As he acquired dexterity in imposition, he lost the 
extreme caution which had guided him at first. At 
length, quite confidently he took risks that one time 
would have turned him cold with fear. One after- 
noon Gregory entered the studio not five minutes 
after Eileen had left it. Smiling, contented, pleased 
at having half an hour with Felix, he sat down in a 
chair whereon the cushion still retained an impression 
of her head. In the Tamborlaynes , house, where 
Felix had resumed his visits, the thickness of a single 
curtain was screen enough for a quick embrace. 
Gregory’s momentary absence from the room fur- 
nished the opportunity for a murmured word, a 
pressure of the hand, a hurried kiss. In fact, he had 
only to turn his back and a swift glance flashed 
between the two. But Gregory Tamborlayne per- 
ceived nothing; one would have thought that he was 
blind and deaf and, maybe, dull-witted also. For 
not even when he had almost surprised them in each 
other’s arms did he notice that phenomenon which 
affects fine sensibilities so often: a “void in the air,” 
so to speak, at the sudden suspension of two guilty 
impulses. 

Gregory, whenever he came near Eileen, continued 
to make Felix the witness of his affectionate demon- 
strations. With askance eyes, Felix would watch 
him bend over her and kiss her. “Poor fellow!” 


EILEEN 


105 


he thought. He was sorry for Gregory. And this 
pity made him, at times, assume involuntarily such 
gentleness that Gregory was drawn toward him the 
more. They managed to maintain that intimate ac- 
cord which had begun in honest friendship; and it 
came to pass, at last, that Felix could spend an hour 
in Gregory’s company enjoyably — without remorse. 
“What a situation!” Sometimes it seemed to him 
that he was existing in a grotesque dream. 

But, never easy for long, he had moments of acute 
apprehension. Now and then an innocent remark, 
like a chance shot finding a fatal billet, drove into 
his heart a terrible fear of discovery. When he 
saw a mere friend, Felix was apt to scrutinize him 
carefully. If he was unusually nervous on a day 
when he met Gregory, he had one breathless moment 
till the “poor fellow’s” face brightened with kind- 
liness. And almost always when he greeted Nina 
he watched her intently for an instant — then felt a 
general relaxation as he told himself : “She knows 
nothing.” 

And what was to be the end of it? He did not 
know. He drifted from the swift current into the 
rapids and through the rapids toward the cataract. 

One afternoon he met on the street Gregory and 
Mortimer Fray. They were going to an auction of 
old Japanese prints concerning which Fray was en- 
thusiastic. The names “Hiroshige,” “Outomaru,” 
“Kiyonaga,” “Hokusai” bubbled from the young 
dilettante’s lips; he went into raptures over “a 
beautiful demonstration of the Chinese feeling of a 


io6 


PREDESTINED 


Yamato picture — a mountain and some fir-trees 
joining thumb and second finger, he made a dainty 
gesture in the air as he described “six ‘joro’ of 
the Ukio-ye school.” He could not have been 
more glib if he had just finished reading a treatise 
on Japanese art. He had his check-book in his 
pocket ; he expected to bring away some bargains. 

“I’ll show you what I get, Piers — that is, if 
you’re interested in such things.” 

“Very much,” said Felix. He had so thoroughly 
acquired the habit of deception that he would have 
avowed instantly an intense interest in something he 
had never heard of ; and undoubtedly he would have 
found some way to prove his affirmation. 

“You’d better come along,” urged Gregory, affec- 
tionately linking arms with Felix. 

“I have some work to do.” 

“Always the industrious apprentice! How does 
the book get on?” 

“Very slowly.” 

“The best work always does,” remarked Fray, 
with a flattering smile. 

Felix, believing that he saw on the dilettante’s face 
the shadow of a sneer, wondered “what the man 
could have against him.” Perhaps, he considered, 
it was partly his own fault: he had instinctively 
disliked Fray from the first. 

While walking home he thought of his work, which 
they had recalled to his mind. He reflected dismally 
that he had not been able to write an original sentence 
in a month. 


EILEEN 


107 

“ What am I coming to ? What is going to happen 
to me?” 

Pedestrians passed him with indifferent glances. 
He began to look absent-mindedly at the faces of 
these strangers. After a while it seemed to him that 
they all wore the same expression — an expression 
of sanity and health. And suddenly he felt like one 
who, nursing within him some consuming, hidden 
malady, walks bashfully among independent, strong 
men — his superiors. 

It was toward the end of March. The winds were 
keen, but flavored with an essence vivifying, fresh, 
and new — an exhalation of the moistened earth, borne 
to the stony city from afar, presaging spring. Mem- 
ory returned to Felix. He thought of that other 
spring amid the roses, of the sun-steeped country- 
side, of his old sensations of simplicity and innocence. 
How far away, those days ! He had been happy then. 
And he realized that he had not been happy since. 

Contentment, self-respect, honesty, everything 
worth keeping, he had thrown away. Crime after 
crime against the hearts of others and against his 
own heart he had committed; and for what? The 
image of Eileen appeared before him; he contem- 
plated it with heavy eyes, all his curiosity appeased, 
all his cupidity dispelled. Nearly every sentimental 
feeling grows feeble some day, and the more violent 
emotions are worn out the sooner. The enchant- 
ment that had held him helpless was dissolving. 

And hope began to stir. Each year, he thought, 
the land grows cold and dark ; the winds are blight- 


io8 


PREDESTINED 


ing; all the tender, growing things are frozen and die, 
till one who did not know would say, “This is the 
end.” But a day comes when the earth stirs be- 
neath its shrivelled surface, when a breath of new 
life plays about it — when sap starts in the trees and 
buds appear and grasses thrust through the soil. 
Presently the hillsides bloom again, bright-feathered 
birds come warbling, flowers nod everywhere, warm 
sunshine floods the ravishing vistas, and the world 
is reborn. 

While Felix walked a fine rain fell. But in the 
midst of the drizzle there was a sudden illumination, 
somewhat as if a great gas-jet had been lighted over- 
head. Looking up at the leaden clouds, he saw them 
breaking. Behind them appeared a white film, mov- 
ing, suffused with brilliancy. Then, through this 
parting veil, down streamed the sunlight, transfigur- 
ing everything, glinting in mid-air upon the falling 
rain-drops, brightening the streets, the house fronts, 
the faces of the people. It seemed to Felix that this 
radiance flowed into his heart — that something im- 
palpable had released itself from his body and was 
mounting upward through the golden mist. His eyes 
quivered. Gazing a-sky, he walked with parted 
lips. 

When, finally, he reached the studio, he found her 
waiting for him. She was sitting in the crimson 
chair, facing the door, expectant. Without moving 
she said, coldly: 

“How late you are!” 

“I’ve been walking miles.” 


EILEEN 


109 


“ Alone?” 

“Yes.” 

“And I here!” 

“Yes.” 

He did not approach her. She stared at him un- 
easily. 

“What’s the matter with you to-day?” 

“I’m about to say good-by to you.” 

She rose, went hurriedly to him, and seized him by 
the shoulders. 

“Felix!” 

“That’s quite useless, I assure you.” 

“Felix, Felix, look at me!” 

“I’m looking at you.” 

She drew a long, quivering breath. Tightening 
her hold on him, she cried, hysterically: 

“And you mean to tell me — you can look at me 
and tell me — that it’s all over?” 

She hid her face against his breast. 

The latch clicked. Gregory and Fray were stand- 
ing in the open doorway. 

Fray was in front, with a portfolio under his arm; 
it was he who had opened the door quickly, without 
knocking. On his weak face appeared a bitter and 
malignant smile, containing no surprise. Making a 
slight bow, he turned, pushed past Gregory, and 
descended the staircase. Gregory entered the room 
with the vacant countenance of a somnambulist. 

She went, with dragging feet, to the crimson chair, 
sat down, and turned away her face. Perfectly 
pale, her husband gazed at her alone. His mouth 


no 


PREDESTINED 


trembled; tears appeared in his eyes and rolled 
down his twitching cheeks. 

At last, in a low voice, he said: 

“Come.” 

And as she did not move, after clearing his throat 
he repeated, softly: 

“Come, Eileen.” 

She rose. With fixed eyes, her gloved hands 
pressed against her temples, swiftly she passed out 
of the room. Gregory followed her. He closed the 
door behind him carefully. 

For twenty-four hours Felix remained shut up in 
the studio, smoking, pacing the floor, lying in bed 
tormented by oppressive dreams, waking with a 
start to tell himself: “Yes, it has happened at last!” 
He had so often, in painful moments of imagination, 
pictured to himself just this catastrophe that at its 
occurrence he felt no great shock of surprise. “But 
what have they said to each other? What are they 
doing now? What will their future be? I have 
ruined two lives!” Still, he found these thoughts 
negligible; his sympathy and self-reproach were 
numb as he speculated on his own future. 

At first it seemed to him that every one must 
know, and hour after hour he waited for Nina’s 
renunciation of him. But he began to reason: 
“Why should she know? Those two would never 
reveal it; whatever Gregory does will be done very 
quietly. But Fray was there! And yet, why should 
Fray betray us all?” 

Then he thought it very strange that Nina had not 


EILEEN 


Hi 


telephoned to ascertain if he was ill. It was the first 
time she had neglected him so long; her silence ter- 
rified him. “ That’s it; she knows everything !” 
But, again, who would tell her? 

At last, unable to bear uncertainty any longer, he 
set out, toward evening, for the Ferrol house. 

The streets were clean and bright; the sun was 
setting; the upper stories of the white stone “ sky- 
scrapers ” glowed with an orange-colored light against 
a sky deep blue, in which the little clouds, by means 
of their transparency and tender contour, called to 
mind thoughts of spring. On lower Fifth Avenue 
people were walking buoyantly, with cheerful faces; 
working girls, passing by in groups, emitted shrill 
laughter; two young men, with overcoats thrown 
open, strode along swinging their canes and smiling 
genially. So, many an afternoon, he had walked 
with Gregory! 

Carriages passed at a brisk trot, the horses throw- 
ing out daintily their slender legs. The boyish 
driver of a dray, wearing an apron of burlap, a 
round badge stuck in the side of his cloth cap, 
imitated, with puckered lips, the trilling of a bird. 
Ah, the countryside; the lilac bushes; the path 
through the woods, its coolness delicious after the 
hot sunshine ; the cadenzas of the birds amid 
the glossy leaves! Spring was coming again, bear- 
ing all its fresh and pure charms — but not for him. 

He neared the Ferrol house. A carriage stopped 
before the door; he saw that it was Mrs. FerroPs 
brougham. His courage turned to water; he stood 


112 


PREDESTINED 


still; he was about to make his escape. But Mrs. 
Ferrol stepped out of the carriage, turned, and saw 
him. Automatically he approached, suffocated by 
the beating of his heart, with everything dancing up 
and down before his eyes, like a man walking toward 
the scaffold. He removed his hat and tried to smile. 

Her small, white face, with its thin features and 
precise frame of gray hair, seemed to him curiously 
unfamiliar. Looking at him steadily, she said: 

“You were coming to my house? My house is 
not open to you, sir.” 

And she went in, through the old-fashioned door- 
way. 

Returning to the studio, he found a note from 
Nina. It contained the words: 

“I shall never lay eyes on you again.” 

Two weeks later, he read in the newspaper that 
Nina and her mother had embarked for Europe. 


1 



PART TWO 
MARIE 




■ 



- 












CHAPTER VI 


As the weeks passed, and, even in the stone-bound 
city, the promises of April, vaguely sweet, were re- 
iterated with more emphasis by May, Felix, of even- 
ings brooding in the studio, realized how much he 
had owed to Nina’s love, and — while losing that — 
how much else he had lost. Every door leading 
into the rich and pleasant regions which, but a little 
while before, he had thought to frequent for life, 
was closed against him now. His isolation seemed 
perfect. 

After reflection, there remained with him invari- 
ably a dull amazement — it had been he, erstwhile full 
of good impulses and honest aspirations, that had so 
used those who cared most for him! Such amaze- 
ment always ended with the exclamation: 

“I was mad!” 

And of this, at least, he was sure: since, in his cold 
retrospection, that period, its allure now incompre- 
hensible, its pleasures proved empty, appeared before 
him all hazy and turbulent, with details confused as if 
each episode had been but half appreciated at the 
time of its occurrence — like something that happens 
in a delirium, and the remembrance of which is but a 
jumble of feverish extravagances. 

IJ 5 


n6 


PREDESTINED 


So he would fall to wondering what power outside 
himself, what evil genius, had driven him headlong 
to disaster — or, as he said, to ruin. 

“ That’s it,” he would repeat, “I’ve ruined my 
life!” Thereupon, he would consider the prospect 
of his changed future with feelings of loneliness and 
helplessness so profound, that a great lassitude would 
steal through his body, and he would sit with eyes 
fixed, with chin sunk on breast, with limbs heavy as 
if wrapped in lead, incapable of putting forth suffi- 
cient strength to raise his hand. 

Indeed, this lassitude from dejection did not en- 
tirely leave him at any hour. In the morning, he 
awoke weary, downcast even before he had his wits 
about him. While getting out of bed, he remem- 
bered with disgust the office of The Evening Sphere. 
Sometimes, half-clothed, unable to make up his mind 
to finish dressing, he would stand for a long while 
behind the window curtains, thinking of nothing, 
gazing out on the brightest sunshine gloomily, his 
whole being permeated with a vague bitterness to- 
ward everything. Then, people hurrying by re- 
minded him that he must get to work. 

His work in the newspaper office, from which all 
the charm of strange adventure had departed, he 
approached with a heavy heart ; necessity had trans- 
formed a pastime into drudgery. 

Every morning, on entering The Sphere building, 
he breathed in the odors of fresh newspapers and lin- 
oleum with an enervating sensation of ennui. Climb- 
ing the spiral staircase, emerging into the office of The 


MARIE 


117 

Evening Sphere , to be enveloped invariably by the 
same pandemonium, he felt as if he were slipping 
into one of those confused dreams full of intermi- 
nable, distasteful labors. 

Round him machines clattered, steam hissed, iron 
clanged. At a shout and a rumble, he dodged men 
who, in their undershirts, with black smears across 
their faces, rolled form-tables at full speed over the 
metal-covered floor. Near-sighted proof-readers, pat- 
tering about with hands full of paper, bumped into 
him. At every step* he was jostled by “copy boys,” 
young fellows in inky aprons carrying galleys of type, 
impatient foremen, bewildered visitors, reporters 
scampering out for news. Then, escaping all these, 
approaching a fog of pipe smoke, he stopped in an 
attitude of resignation amid the reported desks. 
These, dilapidated and dusty, covered with old news- 
papers, shreds of tobacco, mucilage pots, and dirty 
plates left from breakfasts brought in to the “early 
shift,” surrounded the square desk of the city editor, 
and were themselves hemmed in by telegraphers 7 
tables, all the instruments clicking, by typesetters 7 
cases over which, as if over barricades, appeared the 
bald heads of old men, and by pneumatic tubes and 
hoists for manuscript, running to the typographers 7 
room bn the floor above, and always rattling and 
banging. 

Here, when he had a few minutes 7 leisure, Felix 
would sit oblivious to the uproar round him, staring 
out at the little blossoming park and the City Hall, 
but seeing nothing, his mind, in a sort of stupor, 


PREDESTINED 


1 18 

always groping toward recollections that induced 
remorse, melancholy, and bodily languor. “Yes, 
yes, I’ve ruined my life,” he would repeat to himself. 
All his thoughts were repinings for the past ; he could 
see no future. 

Perhaps, when he had come back to the newspaper 
office fresh from looking down at the calm, inscrutable 
features of some suicide, he would wonder: 

“Was he as bad as I? Is he better off now?” 

But then, with a great gush of self-pity: 

“If I were in his place, who would be sorry?” 

It seemed to his nature an indispensable concomi- 
tant to such an act, that one should be sure before- 
hand of some one’s being sorry, of some one’s remem- 
bering with at least a little tenderness. 

As for Felix, he had no one! Tears would fill his 
eyes, till he had to screen his face with his hand, 
while the park, the tall buildings round about, and 
the bright sky, all swam together into a sparkling 
mist. He believed there was not anywhere such 
loneliness as his. Occasionally, he had an intense 
longing to journey to his mother’s grave, and there, 
throwing himself down, embracing the moist mound, 
cover the budding flowers with his tears, while cry- 
ing out : 

“You loved me, I am sure! You would under- 
stand!” 

But his mother’s grave was in the cemetery of 
Pere-Lachaise, in Paris, where, at the last, she had 
begged to be buried, in order that “she might remain 
in the place she had cared most for.” 


MARIE 


119 

He dreamed of other lands, remote and wild, not 
furnished with conventionalities, where, possibly, 
with no one knowing anything about him, he might 
begin his life all over, and make a fortune and a name 
for himself. But where, and how? Those visions 
of his were of the haziest: he saw nothing but hot 
landscapes filled with sunbeams,, vivid flowers, and 
palms, through which he drifted at random, and 
which faded, all at once, like a mirage. 

One day he read in a “society journal” that Denis 
Droyt was in Europe. Though he felt immediately 
a chill, this news did not surprise him. “It’s his 
chance,” Felix admitted. He imagined that serene, 
indefatigable young man following Nina everywhere, 
persistently exhibiting before her all the admirable 
qualities that he had lacked, dissipating her disgust 
for men, rousing in her gradually a new trust, and, 
finally, winning her. They would be married, and 
all the delightful plans that Nina and Felix had once 
made they would carry out — the voyages afar, the 
sojourns in beautiful and tranquil places, the rose- 
colored, random adventures of the fortunate. So it 
was Droyt, after all, who was going to possess her! 
Yet Felix grieved more over the loss of what went 
with her than over losing her. 

Had he ever really loved her ? What, after all, was 
love ? Felix had an idea that it was something superb 
and transfiguring, a divine flaming of the heart, a 
soaring to a higher plane of sense — else all the world’s 
great lovers were impostors. Would he ever experi- 
ence that exaltation ? Or would he die having known 


120 


PREDESTINED 


no nearer approach to it than his frail, pallid affection 
for Nina, or his febrile and unhappy madness for 
Eileen ? 

The Tamborlaynes were gone from New York; 
their house in East Seventy-ninth Street was closed 
and boarded tight. Where were they? Had they 
separated? How would they patch out their shat- 
tered lives ? 

And where was Mortimer Fray? 

When there floated before him a vision of the young 
dilettante’s face, sharp and clever, with its lurking 
smile half ingratiating and half spiteful, Felix felt a 
hot thrill at the pit of his stomach ; his hands clenched, 
he had a spasmodic desire for violence. If only he 
could meet the wretch face to face ! 

But Felix never met him, and knew nothing of his 
friends or haunts. It occurred to him, though, that 
Paul Pavin might know; and that, at any rate, here 
was one person who, thoroughly “ continental,” with 
experiences of wide latitude, and social opinions of 
unusual generosity, should be the same to him as 
ever. But the artist had left America for France; 
his studio was possessed by a stranger, and he was 
not expected to return to New York until mid-winter. 

So that chance of friendship was denied Felix. 

His evenings he spent in the most aimless ways. 
He lounged in his rooms, his puppy, subdued and 
silent, gazing at him mournfully. When he could 
bear the ticking of the clock no longer, he went out 
and wandered through the city, looking at the lights, 
the moving crowds, the brilliant hurly-burly of amuse- 


MARIE 


1 2 1 


ment districts, as if from a great distance. His 
despondency attracted to his notice all sorts of de- 
pressing sights; a profound pessimism made him 
see in everything the saddest, the meanest, and the 
most contemptible elements; his comments were all 
sneers, he meditated on the fatuity and baseness of 
humanity. 

Wickit, the lawyer, sent him three typewritten 
notes asking him to call. Each note Felix tore up 
with a savage laugh. 

“So he's finally heard about it, has he? And now 
he wants his thousand dollars back in his pocket!" 

One night, as he was returning home, a bent, 
familiar figure issued upon the pavement from his 
doorway; it was Joseph! Felix, concealing himself 
in a shadow, watched the aged servant shuffle away. 
The young man was disturbed by obscure forebodings. 

“Now why should that old devil be sneaking round 
after me?” He could see nothing but a menace even 
in Joseph’s visit. Why not? “All the world was 
against him." 

He was more and more attracted by the relief from 
monotony and mental tension that alcohol effects. 
In intoxication he found a means by which he could, 
for the hour, become, as it were, another being, indif- 
ferent to misfortune, as much superior to regrets as to 
anxieties, contemptuous of Fate, replete with gran- 
diose, chimerical intentions that he was going to trans- 
late into deeds “beginning to-morrow." During the 
day, he looked forward to the evening, when such 
temperamental transformation would be possible. 


122 


PREDESTINED 


Since shame, and fear of rebuffs, now kept him 
from showing himself at his club — from which, in- 
deed, owing to his neglect to pay his dues, he had been 
suspended — he frequented the gay hotel cafes along 
Broadway. There, sitting at a small table with a 
glass of whiskey and soda before him, he became a 
familiar figure. The cashiers, crouching on high 
stools behind their little grilles, bowed to him as he 
entered; the bartenders smirked at him patroniz- 
ingly; the waiters, hovering about him with napkins 
rolled up under their left arms, assumed the easy and 
confidential manners which such servants exhibit to- 
ward old customers. He came to have a sort of 
affection for these places, because at his appearance, 
smiles greeted him. He liked always to sit at the 
same table. Now and then, he held long, serious 
conversations with his waiter — banal discussions full 
of trivialities, but which, since he was drinking while 
engaging in them, seemed to him at the moment of 
great interest and importance. 

Then, often, in the midst of this recreation he real- 
ized the puerility of it, the pitiable quality of his satis- 
faction, the difference between the present and the past. 

Occasionally, Felix did what he had never thought 
of doing in the time of his prosperity: he spent the 
evening with some associate from the newspaper 
office. To one, a reporter called “Johnny” Livy, 
Felix was particularly agreeable, perhaps because 
it was Livy who had given him his first informa- 
tion the day he had sought employment of The 
Evening Sphere. 


MARIE 


123 


This reporter was a lean, nervous, anxious-looking 
young man who did everything in jerks, with yellow 
stains on his fingers, and distinguished by a “ Bo- 
hemian ’ ’ nonchalance of dress. Between fitful bursts 
of self-assertion, he exhibited unconsciously all sorts 
of apprehensions — fear of his inability, of his em- 
ployer, of the future, of everything. A precocious 
hypochondriac, he was fascinated by medical jour- 
nals. While dining, he could not help asserting that 
oysters caused typhoid fever, soup indigestion, meat 
skin diseases, tomatoes rheumatism, cheese cancer, 
and so on, not failing to ask the waiter apprehen- 
sively: “Is this water filtered ?” At other times, 
announcing that he was, at heart, a Christian Scien- 
tist, that nothing save fear harmed any one, he de- 
voured course after course voraciously, with a defiant 
manner. 

Felix, starving for companionship, dragged this 
young man, with his broken collar and shiny right 
elbow, into Broadway restaurants, which the re- 
porter entered rubbing his chin, and where he ap- 
peared ill at ease till he had tossed off a couple of 
cocktails. When they had finished disparaging their 
superiors in the office, they discussed journalism, and, 
finally, literature. As Felix, slightly intoxicated, be- 
came eloquent, uttered great names, talked of 
“schools” and “movements,” dived into history 
and emerged scattering quotations, a cloud passed 
over the face of his companion, who sat listening 
with an air of reluctance. Truth is, this young 
reporter’s wings were too feeble for him to accom- 


124 


PREDESTINED 


pany Felix in those flights. Besides, always noting 
a thousand minute differences between his and Felix’s 
clothing, person, voice, manner, and instincts, he was 
unable to meet friendliness half-way. Removed from 
the democratic air of the newspaper office, each dis- 
cerned the social and constitutional differences in the 
other. Their evenings together ended. So passed 
that hope of friendship. 

For a time Felix patronized the theatre assidu- 
ously. But to the tragedies enacted on the stage he 
compared his own tragedy, and in the gayety of the 
comedies he found something false and depressing. 
Then, as June ended, one by one the theatres closed, 
till there were left running only a few musical reviews. 
When he had endured the illogical uproar of each of 
these half a dozen times, he gave up play-going in 
disgust. 

He took long walks with his puppy Pat, nursing 
his melancholy through empty streets and amid the 
deep shadows of the park. Looking up at the stars, 
he pondered the insignificance of individuals and 
their travail, the occult object of life, the riddle of the 
beyond, the possibility of there being something su- 
preme. 

His sense of loneliness did not diminish when he 
tried to imagine the propinquity of a God. He could 
not convince himself that anything, human or super- 
natural, had a care for him. 

He read Nietzsche and Hegel, Marcus Aurelius 
and Renan, Loyola and Luther. So many great 
minds in conflict ! Which to believe, when all seemed 


MARIE 


125 


scuffling together crying, “No, no, God is like this! 
Not so, this only is man’s proper attitude! Nay, 
here alone is peace!” Rumpling the leaves of “New 
Thought” volumes, he essayed to find therein some 
credible gospel. His eyes alone perused the pages. 
Those bland, charitable authors, with all the man- 
nerisms of congenital saints, were just then so far 
removed from him in texture of the soul that he could 
not understand the tongue in which they wrote. 

In the bookshops he saw on all sides placards 
advertising Oliver Corquill’s latest novel, “The Rain- 
bow.” Felix read this book with amazement. Its 
pervasive optimism persuaded the young man that 
Corquill’s was, after all, a surface intellect, without 
deep experience, of the sort that takes everything for 
granted. As he reached “Finis,” his idol fell to 
pieces. The book was actually calculated to enamour 
one of life! 

Felix, for his part, dreamed of writing a great 
novel crushing in its bitterness and cruel truth, that 
should reveal life “as it was” — a mad mask of 
stupidities and agonies. 

So, sitting down at his work-table, he lighted a 
cigar, took up his pen, and waited for the thrill of 
inspiration. 

But soon, in the silence, his thoughts turned in- 
ward. And he would remain for a long while in one 
attitude, dreaming of a different sort of life, eating 
out his heart for the responsive touch of another’s 
hand, for the brightening of another’s eye, for one 
vocal intonation of affection. 


126 


PREDESTINED 


Such evenings often ended in hard drinking. And 
now, through the stupor so induced, the melancholy 
note still faintly struck, like the distant, lugubrious 
tolling of a bell, seeming to make the sound: “Alone 
. . . Alone. . . 

There were times when he sprang up, crying aloud, 
in an incredulous voice: 

“Somewhere people are happy!” 

Then, with the thought, “Happiness! In God’s 
name, where is it to be found?” he would rush out 
into the darkness and roam everywhere. 

One such evening, early in September, when he had 
tramped the streets till footsore, as midnight struck 
Felix found himself before a large hotel in Times 
Square. Seeing men and women descending from 
automobiles and entering there, he believed that he, 
too, was hungry; he thought that he would enjoy 
something dainty to eat and a pint bottle of cham- 
pagne. He entered the hotel restaurant. 

This apartment, illuminated from its lofty roof of 
glass with a green radiance imitating moonlight, was 
fashioned to resemble the approach of an Italian 
garden — buff stone terraces, with staircases, balus- 
trades, and urns containing scarlet flowers, rising at 
the rear against a background of scenery painted with 
a nocturnal landscape full of poplars, and embel- 
lished by an artificial moon. The white tables in the 
body of the restaurant, scattered under trellises, were 
nearly all occupied; a monotonous ripple of conver 
sation was punctuated occasionally by a thin clash 
of silverware ; before the terraces a fountain tinkled ; 


MARIE 127 

beneath the moon, violins and flutes were uttering 
waltz music. 

Many persons looked attentively at Felix. Sud- 
denly he saw, some distance off, at a table beside a 
stone pillar, a familiar face — then another. Miss 
Llanelly and Miss Sinjon, whom he had met in Paul 
Pavin’s studio, were staring at him. A man, seated 
with them, presented a broad back. 

The head waiter attempted to lead Felix past their 
table. Miss Llanelly put out her hand. 

“You in town?” she exclaimed, with a rich, Irish 
smile, her ingenuous astonishment at once subtly 
flattering him. Her skin contained contrasts of red 
and white no less dazzling than ever; she fluttered 
her eyelashes, which were long and heavy, in a co- 
quettish manner. Her large figure, full below the 
shoulders, at the hips adroitly constricted to a re- 
semblance of slimness, was encased in a tight dress 
of taffy-colored Tussur silk. A wide-brimmed hat, 
tilted off her forehead, let some “willow” plumes 
trail half-way down her back. 

Felix eagerly shook hands with both young women. 
A glow of pleasure stole through him; unwilling to 
pass on immediately, he uttered some remarks at 
random — he complained of the hot weather, regretted 
the invigorating days of winter, and began to recall 
Pavin. Miss Llanelly interrupted, quickly: 

“But pardon me! Mr. Piers — Mr. Noon.” 

The man with them got upon his feet. 

This was a burly fellow, clad in blue flannel, with 
a superb Persian opal, cut like a scarab, in his cravat. 


128 


PREDESTINED 


Prematurely gray at the temples, his heavy, dark 
cheeks smooth-shaven, his expression at once shrewd 
and self-indulgent, he seemed to belong to that class 
of young New York men which spends the day 
feverishly clutching at money in order to pass the 
night gayly letting go of it. He was withdrawing 
his large, soft hand from Felix’s when, at a sudden 
thought, he inquired abruptly: 

“What Mr. Piers, may I ask?” 

And as Felix answered, a flush slowly invaded the 
dusky countenance of this stranger. 

“You’re all alone? What a pity!” said Miss 
Llanelly. By dint of looking fixedly at Mr. Noon, 
she caused that gentleman to mumble: 

“Why not join us? We’re just beginning.” 

“Fine!” cried Miss Llanelly, vigorously. “We’ve 
ordered all kinds of things.” Her lips, a vivid red, 
puckered greedily; she had, she announced, “one 
grand appetite.” 

Felix glanced at Miss Sinjon. She continued 
silent, calmly and disinterestedly regarding him with 
her green eyes, the lids of which seemed somewhat 
reddened. He felt himself blushing; he hesitated, 
then sat down stiffly. He was not used to indiffer- 
ence from women. 

This one was less obtrusively attired than her 
friend, in linen dress and hat of russet — a hue har- 
monizing with her hair of reddish-brown, and lending 
to her translucent skin, touched round the eyes with 
the faintest possible coloring, a delicate warmth. 
Her irises, clear as the brooch of green beryls that 


MARIE 


129 

she wore, lost effect because of the lightness of her 
eyelashes; her cheek-bones, without actually pro- 
truding, still seemed prominent ; her white chin was 
square to a degree unusual in young women. She 
was eclipsed, as it were, by her handsome and ex- 
uberant companion. Her self-possession, however, 
was perfect. 

When Felix ventured, with an accent of regret, that 
it was a long while since he had seen her, observing 
him serenely she answered, in a quiet voices 

“Do you count the times you have looked at me 
without bowing?” 

Her reply was like an unexpected blow in the face. 

“I? Never!” he ejaculated. 

But in the most indifferent tones she recalled that 
behavior of his exactly to his mind; it had occurred 
in midwinter — once at Twenty-third Street and 
Broadway, again before a hotel in Fifth Avenue. 
Greatly embarrassed, he stammered that there was 
some mistake, that he had not recognized her. A 
sarcastic smile barely touched her lips; and her 
perspicacious gaze, as if penetrating to the depths of 
his brain, seemed to assure him: “I am not easily 
taken in.” Then, at last releasing him from that 
look, leaning back and scrutinizing the whole res- 
taurant, she uttered: 

“I don’t seem to see any one I know here to-night, 
do you?” 

Felix was first dumfounded, then angered. What 
impertinence! From her manner one might think 
she deserved everything due to a person in the most 


130 


PREDESTINED 


impregnable position in society! As a matter of 
fact, however, what was her exact position? 

Miss Llanelly, after an awkard pause plunging into 
distracted conversation, speedily informed him. 

That evening a musical extravaganza, called “The 
Lost Venus,” had commenced at the Trocadero The- 
atre; Miss Sinjon and Miss Llanelly were engaged 
in it. According to the latter, the “ first-night ” had 
gone with such a dash, and even the newspaper 
critics had been so well pleased, that the piece was 
bound to remain in New York all winter. The 
music was “the kind you like to whistle”; there was 
a “square laugh in every line”; the manner of pro- 
duction was superb; no expense had been spared; 
it was “in Montmorrissy’s best style.” “And you 
know his shows, Mr. Piers. You missed it ? Isn’t 
that miserable! Well, you must rush to it to-morrow 
night, for sure; Marie and I are on at a quarter to 
nine, with the Six Daughters of the Due des 
Champs -Ely sees. Such swell gowns! Where is that 
waiter?” And to Noon, in a voice of authority: 
“Billy, Mr. Piers’s glass is empty.” She pro- 
nounced Felix’s name as if it were something un- 
usual. 

The waiter arrived with another quart of cham- 
pagne. He removed the oyster-plates and served 
minced crabs a la cardinal. 

The encircling babble of voices was penetrated by 
several deep ’cello tones, then by a sweet violin 
phrase, scarcely audible, and the rhythmic rippling 
of flute notes. 


MARIE 


I3i 

“Anitra’s Dance!” exclaimed Felix, forgetting all 
else, wishing only that he could hear distinctly. 

“From the Peer Gynt suite, by Grieg,” assented 
Mr. Noon, in a rich bass voice, profoundly nodding. 
He gulped down another glass of champagne; then, 
turning his moist eyes on Felix, apparently apropos 
of nothing he declared: 

“The Philistine element in life is not the failure to 
understand art.” He frowned in perplexity. Sud- 
denly he added, with an air of heavy satisfaction: 

“ Oscar Wilde said that. Now, Oscar Wilde ” 

Miss Llanelly broke in: 

“If you’re fond of real good music, Mr. Piers, 
that’s another reason why you must hear ‘The Lost 
Venus’ right away.” 

“I am fond of all good things,” said Felix. “Or 
perhaps I should say, of all beautiful things, all 
sense-stirring things — of everything that can lift one 
emotionally out of monotony.” He had no sooner 
finished speaking than moisture filled his eyes, so 
deeply did his whole being thrill at that profession — 
as if, with a few words, he had made by accident a 
revelation exquisitely true, as if he had never so clearly 
interpreted for himself the supreme instinct of the 
soul within him. 

The emotional stimuli in life, the divine exaltations 
that, transfiguring the nature, at the same time trans- 
form the world — how he longed to experience all of 
them to the full! To enjoy, and in enjoying to for- 
get, when there was so much to forget, and — it seemed 
after all — so much to enjoy! Wine in the blood, 


132 


PREDESTINED 


throbbing music, odors of flowers and perfumes, 
visions of red lips and humid eyes; combined to 
evoke indeterminate and lovely promises — earnests 
of such oblivion, of such effacement of the common- 
place and sad, as may have come in premonition to 
those worn mariners out of the drear and vacant sea, 
trembling even to sniff the fumes of Circe’s cup. 
Ah, to be young in every fibre, to search out and seize 
the treasures that the world should hold for youth! 
And before his mind’s eye the horizon of existence 
seemed to widen, to recede immeasurably ; fogs blew 
away; sunlight poured down; he saw, far off, a 
myriad transports prepared. The joy of the dis- 
coverer of a new paradise flowed through him; he 
quivered from anticipation of great happiness; he 
recognized his youth and its potentialities as a god 
might recognize his divinity. And what, indeed, was 
contact with divinity if not this exaltation? He 
would have liked to raise his glass and cry to the 
whole world: 

“I give you the senses, in enrapturing which we 
soar free from all chains toward the sublime!” 

The music palpitated in more ravishing tones ; the 
soft green scene took on a dreamlike aspect; the 
faces of the women were invested with all sorts of 
beauties hitherto unsuspected. Miss Llanelly’s cheeks 
and mouth called up the thought of full-blown roses ; 
but in the pale face of Marie Sinjon Felix discovered 
a delicate allure, such as exists in a bizarre, exotic 
flower. His heart beat heavily. A mist passed be- 
fore his eyes. 


MARIE 


1 35 


“ Why do you dislike me?” he whispered in her ear. 

“I do not dislike you,” she replied, looking at him 
calmly. 

He thought, “She means she neither dislikes me 
nor likes me.” And while Noon, leaning forward 
with cigar smoke curling round his massive face, was 
telling a long anecdote which threatened to conclude 
equivocally, Felix watched intently the unusual 
squareness and the whiteness of her chin. 

The music ended; the musicians, packing away 
their instruments, departed. In corners of the res- 
taurant attendants were putting out lights and piling 
up chairs. A few feet away, a waiter stood contem- 
plating Mr. Noon reproachfully. 

“What time is it?” 

“Two o’clock!” 

“You don’t mean it!” 

As they issued from the hotel, they saw, all along 
Broadway, an army of dirty laborers strung out be- 
side the car tracks, tearing up the street by the light 
of gasoline torches, which roared overhead while 
shooting forth horizontally blinding yellow flames. 
A tepid breeze wavered through the unwashed town, 
bearing with it odors of gasoline fumes, soft asphalt, 
and sewer gas. Shredded rubbish glided along the 
pavement. Even the black sky looked dusty. 

Mr. Noon, choosing an electric cab from the line 
drawn up in front of the hotel, opened the low door. 
Miss Llanelly jumped in. 

“Shall we give you a lift home, dear?” she in- 
quired sweetly of Miss Sinjon. 


134 


PREDESTINED 


“ You know that it’s only a step, for me.” 

“If you will allow me,” proposed Felix. 

Miss Llanelly sank back on the cushions with a 
bright smile. 

“ Good-night, then,” she called, gayly. “ Good- 
night, Mr. Piers! So glad! To-morrow evening, 
remember!” 

Mr. Noon ponderously waved his hand. The cab 
disappeared. Felix and Miss Sinjon remained to- 
gether on the sidewalk. He signalled the nearest 
chauffeur. 

“But it’s only a step.” 

“Never mind.” 

They entered the vehicle; she gave an address in 
Forty-eighth Street. They were whirled northward 
through the stale night air. 

Street lights one after another shone upon her face ; 
her eyes were fixed ahead, her lips composed; even 
while in contact with him how far removed she was, 
apparently, in thought! 

“What are you thinking of ?” he asked her, gently. 

“I am thinking of this abominable city.” 

“Let us escape it for a little while.” And as she 
made no reply, he called to the chauffeur: 

“Drive through the park.” 

The automobile passed Forty-eighth Street, rushed 
on along the empty thoroughfare, and, finally, plunged 
in amid the trees. 

Sweet and pure air blew round them, soft as a 
tender breath upon the cheek, redolent of dewy 
blades and leaves. Beyond the roadway the bushes 


MARIE 


135 


rose in blue-black masses; then, here and there, a 
solitary gas-light was surrounded by a wide aureole 
of foliage, the raw green of which was like no hue 
in nature. As they penetrated the odorous recesses 
of the park, their progress was, for Felix, like an 
abandonment of the known universe, a passage into 
absolute phantasma, promising who knew what rapt- 
urous revelations? 

Two funnels of light appeared far ahead, ap- 
proached swiftly, dazzled, and flashed past. In the 
deep tonneau of that automobile, a man and a woman, 
arms round each other, were united in a kiss. 

Farther on, they met a hansom cab, flitting through 
shadows, drawn by an old, ambling horse. Their 
lanterns illumined for an instant two figures close 
together. And Felix imagined all the dim roadways 
of that place, all the secret by-paths, all the perfumed, 
silent coverts, thus peopled, full of love. When he 
kissed her, the quality of her submission seemed to 
tell him that she had expected this conclusion from 
the first, and did not care one way or the other. 

Soon, turning her green eyes full on him, she said, 
with a stiff smile: 

“You see, one doesn’t escape the city by coming 
into the park.” 


CHAPTER VII 


Felix made haste to attend “The Lost Venus” at 
the Trocadero Theatre. There, sitting in the first 
row, he saw, amid the grouping and melting of 
tableaux on the brilliant stage, Marie Sinjon, all her 
charms enhanced, wearing in the first act an extrava- 
gant hat and dress the color of autumnal leaves, and 
in the second act a spangled, low-neck gown of 
black and green, with a train extraordinarily long, 
and a tiara of paste brilliants. 

When he remembered his evening with her, his 
heart beat heavily: the glamour of the footlights in- 
formed that intimacy with a new value. At last, 
she looked down and recognized him. It was he 
who blushed. 

She, like her friend Miss Llanelly, was a “show 
girl” — one of those actresses whose roles consisted 
in little more than standing round and looking hand- 
some, who were distinguished from their harder-work- 
ing sisters of the chorus by their beauty, their costly 
costumes, their simulation of an elegant languor, 
their air of conferring a favor on audiences merely 
by their mute appearance. Stories remembered of 
a few of them concerning jewels, automobiles, jour- 
neys to Europe, winnings in Wall Street, and suits 
for breach of promise, invested them all with a per- 
verse dignity. 


136 


MARIE 


*37 


In the sphere which they inhabited, if anywhere, 
thought Felix, was to be found gayety and distraction. 
The young man was grateful to the chance that had 
offered, at a moment of profound depression, this 
opportunity. He lost no time in returning to West 
Forty-eighth Street, where, on the ninth floor of an 
apartment hotel, Marie Sin j on occupied two small 
rooms — the “parlor,” lined with crimson cartridge- 
paper, crowded with frail cherry furniture, band- 
boxes, and theatrical trunks, looking out over the 
back yards. 

She received him in negligee with unconcern. Their 
discussion of “The Lost Venus” was interrupted by 
a woman hairdresser: Marie Sinjon, in a wadded 
kimono of gray silk, sat down before a cheval-glass 
and, without any coquetry, submitted to this person’s 
ministrations. 

The hairdresser, squat and shapeless, her lips dis- 
creetly clamped upon a bristle of hairpins, kept shoot- 
ing at Felix, by means of the mirror, stealthy glances 
out of her small, black eyes, which were set in a face 
of indeterminable age. Finally, she mumbled, in an 
innocent tone: 

“Didn’t you wish to pay to-day?” 

A faint flush stained Marie Sinjon’s cheek-bones. 
She answered, rather sharply: 

“You know I always pay on Saturday.” 

The hairdresser raised her eyebrows, shrugged her 
shoulders, and compressed her lips the more, as if she 
had been rebuffed while offering to do her customer 
a service. Packing her brushes and curling-irons into 


PREDESTINED 


138 

a black satchel, she cast a last look at the young 
woman’s head — a monument of tawny curls and un- 
dulations. Then, with another stare at Felix, she 
took herself off. 

He understood that little comedy. “This girl is 
at least not mercenary,” he considered. And, in his 
self-satisfaction at having made so shrewd a judg- 
ment, he invited her to dinner. 

But, with a sudden gleam of eye, she shook her 
head. 

“Some other time.” 

Then, seeing that he was really disappointed, she 
became curious. 

“ Why do you ask me that ? I thought ” 

“What?” 

She looked at him in a nearly spiteful way, then 
flashed forth: 

“You might meet some one, perhaps!” 

Moving to the window, she turned her back on 
him. Dusk had fallen upon a rainy day ; through a 
thin mist, the back yards and rear walls of the houses 
opposite appeared unutterably shabby, gloomy, and 
forlorn. She continued gazing on this scene. 

He joined her. He was flattered by her speech, 
which seemed to him almost born of jealousy; he was 
delighted by the atmosphere of intimacy that she had 
evoked so swiftly, all without intention, he believed. 
The prospect of entering forthwith into a sentimental 
part exhilarated him. He was quite careless what 
he said so long as it was tender. His voice fell in- 
stinctively into the most melting tones. 


MARIE 


139 


“How you have misjudged me! As if I could feel 
that way toward you ! It would mean that I did not 
understand you, that I did not recognize you in- 
stantly for what you are — utterly different, a nat- 
ure superior to all this, misplaced just for the mo- 
ment — ” 

He hesitated ; should he have employed more deli- 
cacy? But she, to his amazement, laying her arm 
across the window-sash, leaning her forehead on her 
hand, began to sob. 

“Life is so unfair!” she gasped. 

In stifled accents, she stammered an incoherent 
synopsis of her sorrows — the isolation of her heart 
amid the wastes into which fate had forced her, the 
meanness of every one’s intentions toward her, the 
struggle against continual disgrace, the cruelty of the 
world’s judgment, the injustice of protected women: 
in fine, she exposed a whole gallery of pathetic views 
of life. Why she was telling all this to him, she said, 
she did not know. Perhaps it was because something 
in his face promised that comprehension, that sort of 
friendship, she had sometimes dreamed of. 

“What am I saying!” she cried suddenly, showing 
him her green eyes full of what seemed consternation, 
and her translucent cheeks smeared with tears. “I 
am crazy, to talk this way! What is there about you 
— you had better go quickly, and not come back. 
That’s it, go, go!” Her voice had hysterical intona- 
tions. She tried to push him from her. Her arm, 
protruding white as marble from the sleeve of her 
kimono, was peculiarly strong. 


140 


PREDESTINED 


But he, at first bewildered by this outburst, was in 
a moment greatly touched. He saw her just as she 
had portrayed herself in the paroxysm of self-pity that 
one gentle word of his had caused. Poor little girl, 
so lonely, so helpless, and so put upon! In compas- 
sion, his frivolity of purpose disappeared. 

He took her hand, which was neither cold nor hot, 
but cool ; he put his arm round her shoulder with the 
gesture of a brother. In a low voice — all the while 
thinking that he was acting rather finely — he spoke 
of the impermanency of misfortune to the brave, of 
“a divine something that takes care of all of us in the 
end.” Many a scrap of comforting philosophy he 
murmured that he had read but, in respect of his own 
case, had been unable to believe. He exhorted her 
to hope for better times, for truer friends, and, 
as one of these, he offered himself, with a sweet 
courtesy, “for so long as she should need him.” She 
grew calmer, drew a quivering breath or two, used 
his handkerchief, and softly thanked him. And he, 
who had come with the most selfish of designs, was 
vaguely conscious that he had^tayed to incur, just 
how he did not know, some subtle kind of obligation. 

This obligation, without trying to analyze it, he 
accepted carelessly, while marching home that even- 
ing in the highest spirits. His heart was expanded 
by delectable anticipations: he was going to escape 
solitude, to know excitement, to have companions of 
some sort. 

Night after night he attended the Trocadero The- 
atre, sitting always in the first row, on the right-hand 


MARIE 


141 

side of the auditorium, near the drums. It was not 
long before he had all the music and lines of “The 
Lost Venus” by heart. He knew each cue for the 
entrance of the “show girls”; and when they ap- 
peared — six in number, undulating in their beautiful 
dresses, gazing out over the orchestra almost arro- 
gantly — he would wait without moving until Marie 
Sinjon, coming to a stop near by, should recognize 
him. Finally, losing all interest in the performance 
when she was not on the stage, Felix would watch 
the drummer. 

This fellow had a broad, ugly face, ornamented 
with dyed “mutton-chop” whiskers that merged into 
his mustache, splotched across the nose from alco- 
holic poisoning, and farther distinguished by the 
watery eyes and tremulous, lugubrious mouth of one 
of those neurasthenic persons always ready to burst 
into tears. He beat his drum as a virtuoso plays the 
piano, with the most exquisite attention to the score 
and the conductor’s baton, rolling up his eyes and 
throwing his head about in an artistic ecstasy. His 
behavior diverted Felix, who wondered what sort of 
life the man led outside the playhouse. 

Felix became known by sight to the chorus girls 
and the comedians, to the ushers and the ticket sell- 
ers, and even to the owner of the play, Montmor- 
rissy, a short, obese, debilitated-looking individual 
with a large nose and a black mustache, who some- 
times, in evening dress, stood in the lobby of the 
theatre, smoking a cigar, exhibiting his diamond 
rings, and chatting with acquaintances. Those em- 


142 


PREDESTINED 


ployed about the place commenced to nod to Felix 
and, perhaps, to smile behind his back. The keeper 
of the stage entrance — an old ruffian with a growl 
for every one — so far unbent as to accept his mes- 
sages and tips. 

He grew used to waiting in the shadows of West 
Thirty-sixth Street, by a dingy door from which, soon 
after eleven o’clock at night, issued the chorus girls, 
their faces pale from fatigue and scrubbing with cold 
cream, their clothing and demeanor in acute con- 
trast to their dainty costumes and sprightly manners 
on the stage. He saw, in the gloom of that side 
street, the reverse, as it were, of the theatrical medal 
— the butterflies of the footlights changed into drab, 
serious working people. The dancers were reduced 
to the appearance of shop-girls; the comedians 
emerged from their false noses and ridiculous wigs 
as aging, harassed-looking men ; the tenor — just now 
how fascinating, devil-may-care a rascal, in his azure 
uniform of the Hussars! — was pounced upon by a 
resolute wife and hustled home; the very prima 
donna — queen of a glittering kingdom, half an hour 
since — appeared fresh from wiping off her girlish- 
ness and animation with her rouge, to wrangle, 
maybe, with some shabby pedler of lace under- 
wear who, bill in hand, had managed to waylay her. 
It seemed that of all the company there was but one 
set which did not lose, on contact with the open air, 
whatever distinction the lights of the proscenium 
had shed. This group was made up of the “show 
girls.” 


MARIE 


143 


Frequently, late in the afternoon, when Felix was 
calling on Marie Sinjon, these young women ran 
in for half an hour’s gossip. For him, there was 
fascination in that intercourse through which, all the 
while, ran a faint undertone of obliquity. Yet some- 
times, while sitting in the little crimson parlor, where 
the shades were drawn against the dusk, where the 
saturnine hairdresser Miriam was silently at work, 
where two or three girls, as well off for fine feathers 
as so many peacocks, were chattering “ shop-talk” 
at once, Felix would feel a mental confusion, an 
enervation of will power, a moral suffocation that 
at the same time shamed and thrilled him — as if 
his manhood were being smothered in so much fla- 
grant femininity. 

When these visitors had gone, Marie Sinjon would 
usually give him in some way to understand that they 
distressed her by their conversation, that she wished 
they would not come to see her. “But in the pro- 
fession,” she would say, “ it’s a bad thing to make ene- 
mies. One has to own to nearly every sort of friend ! ” 

There was one “show girl” whom Felix found 
different from the rest. This was a gentle-faced, 
quiet girl named Miss Qewan. Her soft voice, with 
its intimation of self-restraint, her modest conduct, 
and her charitable views caused Felix to wonder why 
Marie Sinjon had not recognized in her a kindred 
soul and chosen her for an intimate instead of Miss 
Llanelly. 

The latter, exuberantly blooming, bursting with 
rude vitality and high spirits, reminded Felix of a 


144 


PREDESTINED 


splendid peasant whose metropolitan veneer is no 
disguise. She was one of those daughters of the 
people who, amid the meanest surroundings, had 
expanded into a majestic and disquieting beauty, 
her vivid allure becoming finally too superb for its 
environment, and making escape from the monoto- 
nous and drudging life of her own kind too easy. 
With a great appetite for fine clothes, rich food, 
scenes of excitement, and the homage of men, she 
had “ risen,” as she would have said, from some 
shabby home that now, no doubt, she could scarcely 
see in its exact proportions, while looking back 
through all the vicissitudes that must have intervened. 

It was “Nora Llanelly’s good heart,” Felix was 
informed, that had first attracted Marie to her. 

“A kind heart! I thought myself so lucky in 
finding such a thing that I was glad to take every- 
thing else with it. You don’t know, perhaps, how 
rare good hearts are, in some situations, and how 
terribly one can long for them.” 

“Poor little girl, as if I didn’t!” Whereupon he 
assured Marie that he understood her, in that case 
as in all others, perfectly. 

And yet, he reflected, how inaccurate an impres- 
sion of her he had got at first ! 

On that first night, ill at ease before her cold scru- 
tiny, angry at her deliberate rudeness, baffled, finally, 
by her indifferent surrender to his kisses, he had 
believed her to be everything that she, by all her 
subsequent utterances and actions, had convinced 
him she was struggling not to become. For no sooner 


MARIE 


145 


had he shown her his impressible disposition than she 
had seemed, in a burst of trustfulness, determined to 
reveal to him, at least, her true self. Little by little, 
with touching confidences murmured in the dusk, 
with long clear looks disclosing untold yearnings, 
with low sighs at the thought of other sorts of lives, 
she wove about herself a fine, transfiguring fabric — 
a veil tinged with the wan hues of moral beauty 
smothered by mischance, a veil through which, as 
the glamour of it thickened, she appeared to the 
young man ever the more remote, in instincts, from 
those round her, ever a rarer and more estimable 
personality, ever worthier of pity, of comforting ser- 
vices, and of respect. 

Many a time, indeed, he told her how much he 
respected her. “For did he not know the golden 
heart within her, that had been forced to suffer so 
much, yet still retained, as if by a miracle, its first 
fresh beauty, longing for the heights it ought to 
occupy by right, and — if there was justice in the 
universe — was going to gain some day?” 

“You are good,” she would reply, gently laying 
her cool hand on his. “How you help me: how you 
give me hope! What if I had never met you?” 

And, wrapped in a secret reverie, she would gaze 
at him for a long while, her green eyes seeming not 
only to take in all his visible features, but also to 
explore his nature to its depths. 

He was, no doubt, more valuable to her than he 
suspected, with his good looks, with his air of good 
breeding, with his conversation from which there was 


146 


PREDESTINED 


always sdmething to be learned, and with that sug- 
gestion, which he continually disseminated, of aristo- 
cratic antecedents and good fortune. There are 
some persons of whom it is thought instantly: “He 
cannot possibly be ill-born, or poor, or uncertain of 
his future.” It is toward such individuals, with their 
indescribable, yet convincing, promise of great things 
to come, that those turn their eyes who have every- 
thing to gain, and who can gain nothing save through 
attachment to another. 

Marie, by spinning pretty tales about her girl- 
hood — wherein she appeared a quaint, delightful 
little innocent — encouraged Felix to talk about him- 
self, — to tell her something of his life, his work, and 
his ambitions. 

Quite naturally he contrived for her a history of 
himself half true, half false : he related all that was 
flattering in his career — anecdotes of his family, his 
luxurious early years, his travels, the wealthy friends 
one would have thought his boon companions still ; he 
avoided mentioning his loss of fortune and his social 
downfall. “His work in the newspaper office — an 
uncongenial apprenticeship, perhaps — was going to 
be of great value to him some day: he would not 
regret it.” Like many another of a disposition easily 
affected, he was apt to enter into a role so thoroughly 
that, for the moment, it took on the aspect of reality. 
So, often, while uttering some such rhodomontade 
about his journalistic business, for an instant he 
would see himself again in his old guise — a hero, 
making great sacrifices for the sake of literature. 


MARIE 


*47 


With so much ability for self-delusion, it was not 
strange that he should manage to delude another. 
Crossing their wits, they played a well-matched game 
of fence, he as dexterous in feint of reminiscences as 
she, and, no doubt, giving her just as much accurate 
information as she returned. All these lunges and 
parries may have ended by somewhat dazzling the 
eyes of both. For just as he failed to perceive that 
in her story there were hiatuses to spare between 
her “life at home” and her present situation, so, 
probably, she did not see that none of his fashion- 
able adventures were in actual progress. 

The part which his pride had urged upon him 
proved an expensive one to play. 

Fall passed, and winter came: the languishing and 
sombre nuances of these seasons, erstwhile fraught 
with explicit charm, were this year but vaguely felt 
by Felix. He who had been wont to draw keen 
pleasure from innumerable tenuous sources, found 
his old interests all turning stale, his old visions 
losing their beauty, then suffering eclipse. Finally, 
he threw overboard everything except his idol of the 
moment, Pleasure. So, without ballast, like an an- 
tique voyager lured on by siren songs, he steered 
a plunging course into uncharted, mist-filled seas, 
where, on all sides, through vapors crawling sinu- 
ously along the hollows of wine-colored waves, 
appeared white, glistening shapes, leaning forward 
with fair arms outstretched, and uttering cries of 
provocation. 

At such a pass, there is no rationalizing force so 


148 


PREDESTINED 


swift in effect as an awakening to poverty. One 
afternoon, while sitting alone in a cafe, Felix made 
some reckonings, laboriously, with growing conster- 
nation. He stared at the result in horror. He was 
at the end of his resources, and in debt. 

Dismally looking up, at last, from his empty glass, 
he saw, approaching amid the cafe tables, Mr. Noon, 
in a fawn-colored overcoat the lapel of which was 
decorated with a white carnation. 

The new-comer and Felix, because of their senti- 
mental projects, were continually being thrown to- 
gether. On scores of evenings spent in each other’s 
company, they had enjoyed to the full that disinte- 
gration of reserve which alcohol induces. It was on 
the rambling discussions of those hours, the involun- 
tary confessions, the maudlin protestations of esteem, 
that their friendship had been built. 

Recognizing the young man, Noon smiled, rumbled 
a facetious greeting, sat down, and smote the bell on 
the table a hearty blow. But he stopped in the 
midst of a remark to stare at Felix’s face. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked. 

Then, glancing down, he saw, on the table, two or 
three envelopes with figures scribbled over them. 
Felix made haste to pick these up. 

“I feel a little blue this afternoon,” he answered. 
“It may be the weather.” And he looked out of 
the window at the dusk, powdered with snow-flakes, 
which was bringing to an end a cheerless day. 

Noon gulped his highball, lighted a long cigar, 
inhaled the smoke, and rolled his eyes toward the 


MARIE 


149 


gilded ceiling, all the while wearing furtively an ex- 
pression of discomfort. Twice he opened his mouth 
to speak, and twice checked himself with a forced 
cough. 

Felix, meanwhile, regarded him enviously. For 
from the hands of this burly fellow, this sybarite and 
Wall Street speculator who burned the candle night 
and day, there perpetually rained money. Up and 
down Broadway, wherever lights shone brilliantly by 
night, he was referred to as “a prince.” At first- 
nights in the theatres, at midnight supper parties in 
the restaurants, at “stag” dinners where actors and 
their managers congregated with a hilarious swarm 
of artists, hotel proprietors, playwrights and politi- 
cians, he was a familiar figure. Men greeted him 
jovially; women stared at him. With his dark eyes, 
gray temples, heavy jowl, big shoulders, and resplen- 
dent clothes, he was what girls of Miss Llanelly’s 
way of thinking called “a handsome dog.” 

Amid his amusements, he had an air of ponderous 
vigor, of somewhat taurine formidableness. With 
his devotion to elaborate menus, .strong cigars, and 
potent alcoholic drinks, he revealed on all occasions 
his unbridled and unappeasable appetency. But 
whenever he had drunk a good deal, there rose from 
the depths of this heavy roisterer’s nature — just as 
strange, unsuspected objects rise sometimes from the 
bottom of a stirred up pool — an aestheticism curi- 
ously delicate, a pleasure in sensuous, brilliant, and 
decadent forms of art. He delighted in the erotic 
dissonance of the “Salome” of Strauss; he knew by 


PREDESTINED 


150 

book the “ Fleurs du Mai ” of Baudelaire ; he was en- 
raptured by the “Sataniques” of the etcher Rops. 
Invariably, genius, if, instead of soaring, it clung to 
earth, found the way straight to his heart. All gifted 
men who had conspicuous vices fascinated him — 
“they were so human.” 

He had evidently grown fond of Felix. On relin- 
quishing his first attitude toward the young man — 
which, in a less stalwart person, would have seemed 
like disquiet — he had assumed an eager amity, a 
kindliness beyond his wont, nearly such solicitude as 
that by which one may strive to neutralize a hidden 
remorse. If he had one day unwittingly done Felix 
an injury in secret, he could not more pains-takingly 
have tried to make amends. 

When his gaze had thoroughly explored the gilded 
ceiling of the cafe, Noon uttered, in an artificial 
voice : 

“Have you seen the ticker to-day? It was fierce 
downtown. I’m nearly used up, what with the cus- 
tomers and my own little affairs — we stock-brokers, 
you know, Mr. Author, wouldn’t make much if we 
depended on our commissions. But wait till to- 
morrow; there’s going to be a massacre. I’ve got a 
tomahawk up my sleeve, myself. It’s the chance of 
the year, for a man who has some spare cash.” 

Then, as if at a chance thought : 

“Why, look here, Piers! I could put it in your way, 
if you happened to have a fair balance at the bank!” 

A bitter laugh escaped Felix. Then, recollecting 
himself, with averted eyes he answered: 


MARIE 


151 

“ That’s kind of you. But the fact is, Pm already 
over my quarterly income. The old wretch who 
handles the estate won’t ever advance a penny.” 

“Ah, what a shame! And such an opportunity. 
Hold on, I ’ll tell you what ! ’* 

And, slapping a check-book upon the table, Noon 
scribbled a check, in Felix’s favor, for ten thousand 
dollars. 

“To-morrow morning put this check into your 
bank. Then send me immediately, by messenger, 
another, made out to my firm, for the same amount. 
I’ll put it through my office as an order from you, 
for a certain stock, never mind which, on margin. 
Your bother ends there; the rest is up to me. No 
risk to you, d’you see, and you’re on hand when the 
melon is cut.” 

“But why,” faltered Felix, with dry lips, “should 
you do this for me?” 

“Nonsense!” growled Noon, while banging the 
table bell. 

Five days later, Felix received, from the brokerage 
firm of which Noon was a member, a check for three 
thousand two hundred and eighty-three dollars and 
fifty cents. 

In his wild outburst of thankfulness, Felix swore 
that he had learned his lesson, that he would impose 
no more upon the providence which, with awesome 
regularity, was manifest in his dark hours. Here 
was the chance for a fresh start ; these talents, falling 
out of the blue into his lap, how faithfully he would 
husband and augment them! Old dreams grew 


152 


PREDESTINED 


bright; optimism and a sense of power returned to 
him. He felt able to perform Herculean feats of 
strength, to work with the titanic energy and fecun- 
dity of another Balzac, to achieve fame at a bound, 
to become, while still in his twenties, a colossal figure 
— a literary Napoleon. Ah, what a career he was 
now free to enter on! 

And all this thanks to Noon! 

Before Felix’s incoherent thanks, the speculator 
seemed to flinch a little. Then, fixing the other with 
his eyes, he answered, while making a secretive 
gesture: 

“We’ll forget it now. It was just between you and 
me, you understand.” 

“As you say.” Felix drew a long breath of relief. 
So Marie need not know how close he had come to a 
smash-up ! 

His elation demanded outlet ; his prosperity tempted 
him into extravagances. It was Christmas week ; he 
would give in his studio a Christmas eve party of the 
gayest sort. A graceful excuse would be a recent 
triumph of Marie’s. On the withdrawal of an ac- 
tress of small importance from “The Lost Venus,” 
she had, by the greatest luck, obtained a part in 
which she spoke a dozen lines. 

Felix turned his rooms upside down, bought new 
hangings, consulted the caterer whose employees had 
waited on him at balls in other days, ordered flowers 
and holly, ran in and out of jewelry shops in search 
of supper gifts, then, standing under the skylight, 
with his dog barking round him, viewed the arrival 


MARIE 


153 


of many hampers. For this business he had plenty 
of time. He had resigned from The Evening Sphere. 
He was too much occupied by great plans, now, to 
“ think of writing murder stories.” 

He invited a dozen guests, glowing with pleasure at 
the thought of having again so many friends. Had 
he forgotten any? On Christmas eve, at dusk, while 
passing the Metropolitan Opera House, he saw 
stretched across the billboards Mme. Regne Lod- 
brok’s name. 

Paul Pavin ! Surely he had returned by this time ? 
Felix hurried to the portrait-painter’s old studio. 

“Yes, he had returned; he was even in the build- 
ing, on the top floor west.” 

It was the Frenchman’s hour for relaxation. He 
was at home, alone, stretched out on one of the faded 
couches like a huge Viking, ruddy as ever, his spread- 
ing, golden beard aglimmer. 

He rose slowly to his feet, with a bewildered look. 

“Who is it?” he cried, in French. Then he low- 
ered his eyebrows and, with a great laugh, strode 
forward. 

“Mon Dieu , it is that Felix! What a strange 
thing! For a moment, while you stood in the 
shadows, I thought I don’t know what. At least, 
the present seemed to melt away. But what you 
reminded me of, I cannot just put the finger on. 
How curious!” 

He scrutinized Felix in perplexity. Soon he 
shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and clapped his 
heavy hands upon the other’s arms. 


1 54 


PREDESTINED 


“Why did you disappear, answer me that, sir! 
It was unkind of you: those smoky twilights were 
beginning to make me young again. But there, 
I forgive you. You come back in a good hour. 
Noel rings you in.” 

What a kind heart was here! thought Felix. 

They sat down together. Without asking a single 
disconcerting question, Pavin talked about his own 
life of the last six months. He had been in Paris, 
Vienna, and St. Petersburg; he was going soon to 
Washington to portray the President; he had done 
several pictures, and had sold one to the French 
government. Near his chair, there was a large 
canvas, on an easel, turned to the wall. 

Felix remembered the portrait of Eileen Tambor- 
layne, her sittings in PavhTs studio, the evenings 
when he had called there for her, to find her, some- 
times, scarcely ready to set out with him, though 
daylight had long since faded. 

Now, able to view that whole epoch in perspective, 
he interpreted with startling clearness many minute 
circumstances lost on him before. 

“How soft I was!” 

He looked at Pavin intently, full of conjectures, 
but without resentment. One could not, at this late 
day, hold such feelings toward a splendid celebrity 
who permitted an obscure young man to call him 
friend. Felix carried away the Frenchman’s promise 
to “look in round midnight” as if it were a priceless 
boon. His supper-party was going to be distin- 
guished as well as gay. 


MARIE 


155 


Returning home, he found everything in readiness. 
The florist had gone; the caterer’s men had made 
their preparations; the caretaker was sweeping the 
hallway. 

The studio had been stripped of nearly all its 
furniture. The four walls were banked to the sky- 
light with box -trees and holly-bushes. All the glossy 
foliage was powdered with fine tinsel. The circular 
table, with twelve chairs ranged round it, laden with 
china and wine-glasses, nearly hidden by masses of 
mistletoe and deep-red roses, seemed laid in the hol- 
low of some little glen where snow had just fallen. 

Felix turned on all the lights. Producing some 
chopped ice from a waiter, he mixed himself a couple 
of cocktails. Then he lighted a cigarette, picked up 
The Evening Sphere and, with a sigh of satisfaction, 
sat down beside the refulgent table,, to kill time. 

On the second page of the newspaper he read : 

“ Paris, December 24. Mrs. James Corrochie 
Ferrol, of New York, died suddenly to-day, at the 
Hotel Ritz, of heart failure. . . 

Felix sat motionless, intent on this catastrophe. He 
imagined the scene which was doubtless being en- 
acted at the moment, thousands of miles away: in an 
alcove heavy with shadows, the daughter sitting beside 
the body of the mother, while, throughout the French 
city, church bells were uttering Christmas chimes. 

But he was unable to feel the poignancy of that 
picture. He groped in his heart for the appropriate 
emotions. He could not find them. They had been 
obliterated ? 


CHAPTER VIII 


Half of Felix’s guests, with a nonchalance engen- 
dered of long dinners and hours spent in cafes, 
brought with them to the supper-party their com- 
panions of the earlier evening. In the studio, amid a 
confusion of large coiffures and close-t rimmed heads, 
appeared on all sides unfamiliar faces. “Show 
girls/’ radiant in light-colored dresses, coolly intro- 
duced strange young men who apologized unsteadily 
for intruding. Some one dragged in the tenor of 
“The Lost Venus,” who had managed to give his 
wife the slip at the stage door. Noon produced no 
less a personage than Montmorrissy, the theatrical 
manager; and, as if this were not enough, Pavin 
arrived with another unexpected celebrity — Oliver 
Corquill, the novelist. These two had been dining 
at the same house on Fifth Avenue, and Corquill, 
remembering Felix perfectly, had consented — out of 
curiosity, perhaps — to “look in for a moment.” 

Felix soon perceived that the writer’s eye was on 
him constantly. If he had played the complaisant 
host well enough before, forthwith he surpassed him- 
self. He gave confidence to dismayed waiters, made 
persons whom he had never seen before laugh out- 
right at the whimsical good nature of his greetings, 
and drank a cocktail with nearly every group of new 
156 


MARIE 


157 


arrivals. Twenty-one persons wedged themselves 
round the table, to which a dozen had been invited, 
in such good fellowship that several young women 
agreed to share their plates with total strangers. 
For a time it was thought that Montmorrissy would 
have to take Marie's quiet friend, Miss Qewan, on 
his knee. 

With the appearance of the champagne, the assem- 
bly, for the most part already stimulated, became 
hilarious — as if the mere sight of those large bottles 
wrapped in napkins were exhilarating. The con- 
tinuous vocal din, pierced by shrill laughter, Felix 
presently imagined to be like the babble of some 
loose, pagan ritual of antiquity; and in the solemn 
countenances of the waiters, moving to and fro above 
the beaming faces of the guests, the young man 
found, to his diversion, something sacerdotal, as if 
there were ministering here a bizarre' priesthood of 
the vine. 

“So, surely, the creatures of Dionysos in secret 
glens," he thought. “Why, for that matter, does 
not time turn back to-night: have we not here the 
most charming maenads, and as many aegipans, and 
no doubt a satyr or two — the whole rout — besides 
the proper woodland setting? Beat, drums; blow, 
pipes; we’ll swing the leopard skins again! What 
is it blotches the recesses of the forest with red fires ? 
The god’s afoot; the green eyes of his lynxes come 
flickering through bracken; the torchlight wavers 
nearer over the convolutions of great branches — 
louder the corybantes’ drums; frenzy bursts round 


PREDESTINED 


158 

about : the world’s aflame, and writhing in a fanatical 
ecstasy. Join in! Who knows the ancient cry? 
Evoe! Saboi!” And, shivering with delight at the 
pictures of primeval orgies which those words evoked, 
he repeated, under his breath: 

“Evoe! Saboi!” 

“Felix, what are you muttering?” exclaimed 
Marie, who, in a new dress of old-rose silk, her tawny 
hair bound with a fillet of black velvet, sat beside 
him. 

He raised his head. As he gazed round at his 
friends, with the sensations of one returning from 
afar, loneliness chilled his heart. Three times a 
waiter had to whisper to him that “a party wished 
to see him in the hallway.” 

At the end of the hallway, Felix found a sad-faced 
little woman, plainly dressed, standing in a diffident 
attitude, and staring at him with large, lustrous eyes. 

She was evidently taken aback by this apparition 
of a fine, flushed young man in evening dress, with 
valuable pearls in the embroidered bosom of his 
shirt, and a gold fob glittering on his hip. Protesting 
timidly that “he was not the gentleman she had 
expected to see,” she inquired for the consumptive 
artist from whom Felix had rented the studio. 

“But he has not lived in New York for over a 
year!” the young man informed her. 

Her small, pale face, the face of a woman of thirty, 
slowly expressed weariness and despair. 

“Thank you very much, sir,” she said, listlessly — 
then turned toward the staircase. 


MARIE 


s 

159 


Through the half-open doorway of the studio came 
voices of women raised in a waltz-song from “The 
Lost Venus.” Half-way down the first flight of steps, 
the stranger paused to listen, her white face upturned 
and seeming to float mysteriously midst the shadows 
of the staircase well, wherein her sombrely clothed 
shape was blotted out. Presently, at the outer cor- 
ners of her lustrous eyes appeared two tears, ready 
to roll down her cheeks. 

Felix, distressed, leaned over the balustrade. 

“You are in trouble. Surely I can help you in 
some way? At least,. me try to find your friend’s 
address.” 

She shook her head, and the two tears slid quickly, 
glistening, down her face. Then, like a child that 
knows whom to confide in: 

“He was my husband’s friend. I thought perhaps 
he could tell me where my husband is. He’s left 
me again, this month past, on one of his lovely sprees. 
But I thought Christmas eve might bring him home, 
or that I might find him!” 

Leaning against the rail, hiding her face, she 
sobbed: 

“Oh, if I hadn’t come here to-night, and heard 
people having a good time!” 

Suddenly, the stranger flashed at Felix a horror- 
stricken look, cried, in an agitated voice: “What can 
you think of me!” and ran down the stairs. 

“Stop!” he called after her. He started in pur- 
suit. But he had not reached the second floor, when 
he heard the street door slam. 


160 PREDESTINED 

As he re-entered the studio, every one stopped 
talking to look at him. Marie’s green eyes seemed 
to plunge into his brain. 

When he had recounted his experience to her, she 
whispered, in a voice trembling with anger: 

“I should think, my dear, that you could manage 
a little more cleverly — at least so that twenty people 
couldn’t have the laugh on me!” 

He protested in bewilderment. As two or three 
girls were, indeed, watching them with sweet, mali- 
cious smiles, Marie turned to Noon, who sat the other 
side of her. 

The speculator, his massive face shining, had 
reached the aesthetic stage of his intoxication. With 
half-shut eyes, he was muttering: 

“The most subtle epicureanism consists in chaste 
pursuits in the midst of frenzy.” And, amid the 
uproar of advanced revelry, he began to intone, in 
his bull’s voice, an old Latin hymn in which the first 
syllable of every line resembled a note of the musical 
scale. At a remark of Marie’s, he was good enough 
to leave off shouting. And presently Felix, to his 
amazement, heard the two discussing — she as intel- 
ligently, it appeared, as Noon — the principles of the 
Gregorian chant. 

Good heavens, the curious scraps of knowledge 
that every little while he was discovering in her! 
For the hundredth time, he pictured for himself a 
scene that many an indefinite “confession” of hers 
had helped him to construct: an old, placid home- 
stead somewhere, in which, part of a gentle family 


MARIE 


161 


circle — how pitiful, the loss of it — she had been culti- 
vated for far different ends. 

Nora Llanelly, on his other hand, leaning against 
his shoulder, was laughing softly at what had just 
amazed him. Her exuberant form was laced into 
a light-green dress; her cheeks were bright with 
pulsing blood; her lips glowed vividly; her eyes 
shone with unusual brilliancy. She was a disturb- 
ing beauty at close quarters. 

But she seemed moved by no feeling save generous 
admiration for Marie, who was meeting Noon’s jargon 
so nearly on an equal footing. 

“ Listen to her,” whispered Nora, somewhat un- 
steadily. “ Isn’t she the wonderful kid ? Would you 
ever think she started life as she did — faith, as both of 
us did? We grew up in the same block, you know.” 

“You and she! I thought you had known each 
other only a little while!” 

“That’s a good one!” She laughed in his face. 
“Why, I’ve known her all my life.” 

Carried away, Felix thought, by something analo- 
gous to the pride of a “self-made man” recounting 
circumstances of his humble origin, she began, gig- 
gling, to relate what she called “comical” reminis- 
cences of her early youth, in which Marie had a 
part. And there rose before the young man views 
of mean city streets on summer nights, lined with 
flat-houses all open windows and rusty fire-escapes, 
swarming with slattern figures lightly clad — views 
midst which two immature girls of the people, untidy 
in cheap clothes, thin from malnutrition, but full of 


162 


PREDESTINED 


the feverish energy of curiosity, moved seeking their 
first taste of puerile romance, mischief, consterna- 
tion, deception, and distorted ambition. 

A bolt from the blue — that disclosure! 

When, in the smoky studio, revelry had reached its 
height and failed from sheer exhaustion; when the 
blue glimmer of the Christmas dawn, creeping through 
the skylight, had sent all the jaded roisterers dragging 
off to rest; when, for Felix, a heavy sleep had given 
place to all the aches and nauseas of resuscitation, 
there contested for the young man’s notice, with his 
bodily pain, an agonizing query. This girl of faint 
flushes and translucent tissues, this creature of ob- 
scure, ingratiating charms, so adroit in simulation of 
refinement — where had she acquired the qualities 
that made her seem superior to her surroundings? 
In what long-attended schools, from what deeply 
interested teachers, at whose patient, fondling hands? 
He had now, for the first time, visions of predecessors 
more cultivated, brilliant, and amiable, than he. 
Such thoughts were scarcely to be borne. 

All the while, she must have been laughing at him 
for his gullibility. To the devil with such deceit ! 

Ah, but the long, perfumed hours! 

It needed no more than this to show him how 
closely the coils of tender habit had enwrapped him. 
In that play which he had begun, for diversion’s sake, 
with tongue in cheek, he could now pull a tragic 
enough grimace. Forthwith, he began to suffer all 
the anguishes inevitable in a passion fashioned on 
such a pattern and of such materials. 


MARIE 


1 6 3 

The first explosion immediately followed their next 
meeting; it was she, with an angry reference to his 
“ mysterious” visitor of the supper-party, who un- 
wittingly fired the train. 

“I can guess who it was, too! I should have 
thought, if words mean anything, you would have 
given that up.” 

“I don’t understand you.” 

“Ah,” she retorted, “you think I haven’t heard! 
About you and a woman with black hair — oh, a very 
fashionable-looking woman — whom you used to be 
seen with everywhere. Deny it if you can!” 

“That belongs to the past,” he answered, wincing. 
Then, in a gust of rage: 

“And your past! Have I ever taunted you with 
it?” And his volley of recriminations, brutally ac- 
curate, thanks to Nora Llanelly, made her give back 
as if he had showered her with so many blows. 

She sank upon the couch, and buried her face amid 
the pillows. Finally, there came to his ears, between 
sobs, in muffled tones, her self-justification : 

“What wonder if a loving woman should strive to 
appear worthier than she was ? And the more recent 
past — how she hated it, how she had hoped to forget 
it now! But no: women were never forgiven, even 
when, in their own souls, they felt themselves clarified 
by love. Fond, foolish, pitiable dreams of one who 
had never loved before! She had thought to find in 
him a unique nobility, a nature rising above the 
heartless judgment of the world!” 

Thus, in effect, her plaint. Attacked at his most 


164 


PREDESTINED 


vulnerable points, seized, at sight of so much agita- 
tion, with an overpowering physical excitement, he 
threw himself down beside the couch, and took her 
in his arms. That was a bitter-sweet, incoherent 
quarter of an hour, wherein sobs gradually ceased, 
and tears were kissed away, and one, at least, groping 
with his senses instead of with his logic, had no clear 
understanding how all had been ostensibly made 
right once more. In such exhaustion as ensues from 
self-abandonment, they drew themselves slowly back 
toward sanity by feeble and pathetic discourse. 
She faltered: 

“If you only knew the dreams I’ve had! To 
escape all this, and all that’s past, with you — never 
to see it, or think of it, again! A place far away 
in the country, so quiet, so peaceful, where I could 
be happy with you, where you could do those great 
things you are planning, and have dogs, and horses, 
and old friends round you.” 

This tableau abruptly gave him pause: it was ar- 
ranged decidedly in an atmosphere of domesticity. 
A host of wistful ambiguities which she had uttered 
in the past seemed now made plain. 

Still, with her arms round him and her breath upon 
his cheek, he could not see, in the vague portents that 
were gathering, sufficient incongruity to alarm him. 
All sorts of extravagance, if contemplated from a 
sentimental view-point, presently grow reasonable. 

From that scene Felix emerged, to his subsequent 
surprise, as poor in information as before: Marie, it 
appeared, while admitting everything he had taxed 


MARIE 


165 

her with, had neglected to offer further particulars. 
Moreover, he had promised “ never to bring up the 
hateful past again.” 

What, then, had he accomplished ? He had been 
the means of breaking the friendship between Marie 
and Nora Llanelly, who, after a violent quarrel, had 
parted company “ forever.” 

This was the easier since Nora — who had first met 
Noon while rehearsing for “The Lost Venus” — be- 
gan the year by informing every one, while waving 
plump hands which glittered with some new rings, 
that she was “tired of acting.” She abandoned the 
stage. Undecided whether to make a little journey 
of recuperation to Monte Carlo or to Bermuda, she 
favored Monte Carlo, since Paris, with its dress- 
makers, was, she understood, on the way. However, 
she remained in New York, never far from the racket 
of theatres and night restaurants, and regularly every 
fair Sunday afternoon appeared on the East Drive in 
Central Park, reclining in a hired victoria, elabo- 
rately dressed, brilliant of complexion, but very prim 
in mien, and with an unhappy eye on the coachman 
when his hat was cocked too far over his ear. 

Marie could presently afford to smile at Nora in 
her elegant leisure. 

Since other of her unconfessed ambitions were not 
easy of immediate fulfilment, Marie, who appeared 
to favor the maxim that inaction equalled retro- 
gression, set all her energies to the feat of climbing 
the theatrical ladder. 

One night in February, favored by that cool au- 


PREDESTINED 


1 66 

dacity which Felix had observed in her at the first, 
without warning she played her trifling rdle at the 
Trocadero Theatre in mimicry of a well-known tragic 
actress. The audience, at once relishing the mali- 
cious travesty, stirred in amusement, burst into laugh- 
ter, and, as she trailed her skirts toward the wings, 
sent after her a clatter of applause. In the second 
act, when, from the auditorium, a general chuckle 
greeted her reappearance, her effrontery was par- 
doned by Montmorrissy. Within a week, that shrewd 
personage was himself drilling her in an amplified 
version of her part ; in March he permitted her to try 
her voice in an eccentric trio ; and in April he prom- 
ised her the soubrette’s role in his forthcoming sum- 
mer review, “The Silly Season.” By his confession, 
he was nearly as much astonished at Marie’s per- 
formance as was Felix. 

The latter, from wavering between pride and an 
intuitive uneasiness, ended by wishing that she had 
never “made her hit.” 

Everything about Marie was now in process of 
change. 

She moved from West Forty-eighth Street to a 
larger hotel on Lincoln Square, where, in three rooms, 
she supplemented the furniture with a hired piano, 
some “Turkish” chairs, a davenport, and fresh por- 
tieres of pale-green velours. Her door was opened 
by a small, lax-mouthed mulatto woman, Mattie by 
name, whom she had taken as maid. 

Amid her altering surroundings, Marie herself 
sometimes presented to Felix, when he chanced on 


MARIE 167 

her unexpectedly, a new presence. Her figure — in 
dresses of the prevailing, so-called “Empire,” style — 
attained so extraordinary a slimness that it resembled 
the attenuated models in fashion journals. One 
could not now, however, any more than formerly, 
find a detail in her appearance that was in bad taste. 
“Refinement” was evidently more than ever the 
shibboleth with her; and she did not even neglect to 
note every week, while poring over the “society” 
photographs in The Sunday Era , how the coiffures of 
rich women of distinction were arranged. Her own 
hair appeared to have turned a darker auburn; her 
eyebrows and lashes, which, on account of their light 
hue, had made her eyes too pale, no longer seemed 
at fault. 

Perhaps it was for this reason that her charms 
gained emphasis. She was more often stared at on 
the street. Men followed her about. 

Then, too, in restaurants, at every other table 
there now seemed to be some old friend that had 
found his memory, moved by that amiability felt 
toward persons who, by their successes, make even 
mere acquaintance with them valuable. Felix was 
disgusted and angered by the polite grins of strange 
men who saluted her. Into many of these faces he 
looked with sickening conjectures. 

Her time was now much occupied. She had re- 
hearsals to attend, appointments to keep at cos- 
tumer’s and shoemaker’s; her dresses required 
interminable fittings; the stupidity of wig-makers 
necessitated unexpected absences from home; Mont- 


PREDESTINED 


168 

morrissy “ wanted to see her about her new part.” 
Felix’s afternoon hour with Marie had frequently to 
be abandoned. 

The young man accepted everything in silence, 
with a heavy heart. She seemed, as she became 
more valuable in all ways, to be slipping gradually 
from him. 

Sometimes Marie, showering his gloomy face with 
kisses, would beseech him to be reasonable. One 
evening, coming home in the twilight to find him 
waiting at a front window, she inquired, out of 
patience : 

“ Where is Mattie? Why do you stare at me that 
way? No doubt you think I’ve been enjoying my- 
self, rehearsing the same song fifty times in a dirty 
hall! Is it my fault if I’m always busy now?” 
Then her eyes softened; she embraced him, and 
murmured : 

“Some day, perhaps, it won’t be so?” 

He had told her long since, when driven into a 
corner by her gentle inquiries, that “his family estate 
was, to be turned over to him when he was thirty.” 

Unresponsive to her caress, he demanded, sud- 
denly : 

“Who brought you home in the hansom?” 

While slowly lifting her large hat off her curls, she 
mumbled indifferently, through a sheaf of hat-pins: 

“Billy Noon. I met him on the street; he was 
kind enough to give me a lift.” 

“Your quarrel with Nora doesn’t include him, 
then?” 


MARIE 


169 


“Why should it?” 

As always when irritated, Felix had recourse to a 
cigarette. Marie also took one from his gold case. 
She was trying to inure herself to smoking, since it 
had become so fashionable an accomplishment. 

“Noon isn’t well,” she remarked. “You’ve seen 
him lately? He’s got a nervous habit of twitching 
back his head.” 

Felix shrugged his shoulders. Whenever, now- 
adays, he met the speculator — who invariably had 
something flattering to say about Marie — it irked 
him to maintain the warm manner imposed upon 
him by his debt of gratitude. 

“His condition isn’t remarkable,” Felix answered, 
shortly. “His father died of locomotor ataxia. Noon 
had St. Vitus’s dance when a boy. He may expect 
nearly anything before he’s through.” This thought 
almost pleased the young man. 

“Do you believe that sort of stuff? His trouble is 
just that he leads too irregular a life. Do you know, 
dear, I think you might almost take a little warning 
from him?” 

Indeed, during the past half year Felix had been 
following closely in Noon’s footsteps. 

His new environment, with all its provocations of 
opportunity and example, was constituted as if for 
the very purpose of unbalancing a nature not able to 
resist the call of pleasure. Felix, always immoderate 
in exhilarative pursuits, soon reached a stage where 
excitement was his common habit. He was finally 
at a pass where artificial stimulation had become 


PREDESTINED 


170 

so large a feature of his existence that he was lost 
without it. 

Occasionally, he recalled with surprise times not 
long past when, though living in all satisfaction, he 
had not smoked incessantly, or felt at sight of liquors 
an almost automatic impulse to sample them. Scru- 
tinizing certain men, he would marvel at their uncon- 
scious continence. One cigar, one drink — these fin- 
ished, they seemed to desire no more! With him, 
one cigar, one drink, were but the incitement. 

In return for his debility of mornings, he experi' 
enced at night — so long as his potations did not 
stupefy him — a superb deliverance from all restraint 
— the sloughing, as it were, of a cumbrous mental 
envelope. What ravishing emotional expansions did 
he not then enjoy! What delicate perceptions did he 
not then attain ! How prodigally the world revealed 
its treasuries of opportunity! How richly life was 
englamoured with romance! 

At those moments, his relations with Marie were 
clothed in exquisite refinements. Now and then, 
returning toward morning to his rooms, he sat down 
at his writing-table — his dog Pat, freshly awakened, 
yawning against his knee — and poured out to her on 
paper such gossamer fancies as a troubadour, all 
spiritual love, might dedicate to some white queen. 
He could never tease Marie into telling him where 
she kept his letters. 

But perhaps, while wandering home in the small 
hours, he found his intoxication waning on the way. 
Then, in empty streets full of the freshness that fills 


MARIE 


171 

a city before dawn, he gloomed upon a time when 
contact with immaculate nature had engendered no 
remorse. 

Late one night, his feet brought him before the Fer- 
rol house. Doors and windows were boarded over. 
A sign proclaimed the place for sale. From the attic 
shone a light; old Joseph was still there, perhaps? 

Ah, the sunny days of boyhood, the clarity of early 
•youth, the countryside, and friends in whose lives 
there was no fault! 

Was he forgotten? No, surely not forgotten, but 
remembered with contempt. 

Rage surged through him — rage at himself, at 
everything, at Nina. Making a threatening gesture, 
he ejaculated: 

“I’ll show her, yet!” 

Some day, in contemplating his fame she would be 
forced, to his revenge, into unreasoning regret! 

He had continually a conviction of great years to 
ensue. A nebular theory of his — wherein he found 
no small excuse for present laxity — was that there 
would rise, at last, from the ferment of his emotional 
and physical excesses, an invaluable essence of ex- 
perience. “A great artist,” he had read somewhere, 
in effect, “must himself have known everything that 
he transcribes.” Felix — who had also read Schopen- 
hauer — considered that he showed at least one in- 
stinct of genius in this aspiration: to express, finally, 
not what he had accumulated in his brain of the ex- 
periences of others, but the countless conceptions of 
that unique personality he felt himself, in all deep 


172 


PREDESTINED 


moments, to be. To add to the world’s recorded 
knowledge of humanity something unprecedented, 
and not only to the world of his time, but also — 
working with an art so sound as to defy the years — 
to the world of some remote posterity! Undying 
fame! He thrilled at the thought of thus conquering 
ordinary human limitations, of not perishing at 
death, of stamping an almost ineradicable signet of 
his brain upon the sphere he lived in. 

With such motives developing, he gathered energy 
to work, despite the violence of his pastimes, at a 
furious rate. Indeed, for the moment the very, ex- 
cessive stimulation of his nerves assisted him to 
performances of unnatural merit. The same means 
that released him, nightly, from the commonplace 
in thought, freed him, daily, from all natural mental 
inhibitions. 

It came to pass that his brain was stagnant when 
he was not agitating it with tobacco or alcohol. He 
worked best, he asserted, with a pipe in his mouth 
and a decanter near at hand. 

His short stories found ready market with the 
magazines; a novel, the very motive of which he 
contemplated with exultation, was roughly taking 
shape. Editors began to write to him in flattering 
and inquiring terms. Oliver Corquill, meeting Felix 
on the street, was quick with compliments. He 
declared that the young man had surprised him. 

But the novelist still had a good deal of advice to 
offer. He concluded a technical dissertation by say- 
ing, in a kindly voice: 


MARIE 


173 


“If you will pardon me, Piers, I think that at 
present you are too much an actor, not enough of a 
spectator, to appreciate the drama accurately.” 

“But,” protested Felix, with a blush, remember- 
ing his aphorism, “can one describe without having 
felt?” 

“I will say this, at least,” Corquill replied. “One 
cannot describe clearly what he is experiencing. In 
the midst of stress, one sees everything with partial 
eyes. Judgment, such as is necessary for intelligent 
work of our kind, contains no emotional prejudices. 
He records life precisely who views it from without, 
just as it is an alien historian, not a soldier in the 
heat of battle, who records the true complexion of a 
war. So it is that you will not begin to attain your 
ends till you detach yourself from the hurly-burly of 
experience. The difficulty is, in many cases, finally 
to detach oneself . To take a violent example: some- 
times the soldier is so seriously crippled on the field 
that he never comes to write his memoirs.” 

Paul Pavin, too, preached his sermon, and more 
emphatically. 

“It is well to be young, my Felix, and to learn life; 
but, mon Dieu , even youth, if it is to develop into 
something, should contain a grain of moderation. 
You go too far: one of these days you will find your- 
self beyond your depth, and the swim back too long. 
Put down that whiskey and soda ; you are not drink- 
ing it because you are thirsty. Suppose, now, I 
painted portraits with my stomach full of cham- 
pagne? Or with my head full of some woman? 


174 


PREDESTINED 


Art is its own stimulus, and foreign stimulation has 
wrecked it many a time. Mme. Lodbrok is going to 
look in here presently: I will get her to tell you a 
story.” 

The singer, having supplemented her season’s 
work in opera with a profitable concert tour through 
the Middle West, was about to sail for Europe. 
Indeed, she came that afternoon to Pavin’s studio to 
say good-by. As majestic of port, fair, and good- 
humored as ever, she greeted Felix heartily, and, in 
passing to her deep chair beside the copper coffee- 
pot, could not forego the pleasure of pinching his 
cheek. 

“What is there about him, Pavin, to make me 
do that? He will go far, I think — this boy!” 

“I have just been telling him that he will go too 
far, unless he takes care,” returned the artist, as 
flatly as if Felix were not present. “I am reminded 
of a certain old history that we both know too well. 
Chere amie, are you willing to relate it?” 

Mme. Lodbrok set down her coffee-cup. Her face 
clouded. 

“You wish me to tell him about Buron?” 

For a while she looked out, through the great 
“north light,” at the tender sky. High in the blue 
lay motionless a few transparent little clouds, all 
trailing shreds, slowly reddening in the sunshine of 
the late afternoon. It was early May. A light 
breeze, drifting through open sections of the “north 
light,” dispelled the tobacco smoke and scattered 
faint, fresh odors. 


MARIE 


175 


Mme. Lodbrok woke. 

“Thirty years! Figure to yourself, Paul, that it is 
thirty years !” 

Then, to Felix: 

“Did you ever hear of Pierre Buron?” 

He shook his head. 

“Well, that is natural. ‘My vision reaches too 
far ahead/ he used to say. ‘ It is not my own period, 
even in my own country, that will appreciate me.’ 
But when you speak of the three little, thin books of 
Pierre Buron to the very few in Paris who know, 
they will answer — 'There is the quintessence of 
literature. It will rise again.’ 

“He was handsomer than you, liebchen , and with 
such eyes!” 

Pavin, nodding his big beard, interjected: 

“I used to pass him on the street, when I was a 
poverty-stricken young devil of a student. Eh, how 
those eyes of his held me! Without knowing him, 
I loved him. Then, one day, in the Luxembourg 
Gardens, he sat down beside me. From that time, 
he permitted me to be his friend.” 

“Yes,” assented Mme. Lodbrok, “he had a great 
charm for men, and, faith, a charm for women! For 
my part, I considered him a god. I was eighteen, 
fresh from Sweden, a student in the Conservatory, 
when he married me. 

“What prospects! He had youth, elegance, the 
prestige of an old family, a sufficient fortune, and 
talents that put his head among the clouds. He was 
a person absolutely different, enjoying a — what is 


176 


PREDESTINED 


that phrase — ‘ divine release from the common ways 
of men.’ 

“When his first book appeared, the marvellous life 
that was expected of him! 

“Then he took to drink, deliberately, as he took to 
all dissipations, in order to feel every human thrill. 
What a curiosity about life he had! Before it was 
appeased, he found himself caught. 

“We know how much more quickly a delicate 
mechanism is ruined than a coarse one. Bit by 
bit, all that beautiful fabric of genius was strained to 
pieces. In time everything admirable in his nature 
was destroyed. His brilliancy, his good name, and 
his fortune gone, he sank, through all sorts of shame- 
ful vicissitudes, from sight. And there remained only 
those three little books, that had been thought the 
forerunners of how splendid a career!” 

After a long pause Felix, clearing his throat, 
asked, timidly: 

“He is still alive, then?” 

Mme. Lodbrok produced a handkerchief, and 
blew her nose. She replied: 

“If he were dead, I am certain, I should feel it. 
Yes, poor creature, surely, somewhere or other, he is 
still dragging round his chains.” 


CHAPTER IX 


Felix considered the philosophy of Paul Pavin. 

That Frenchman, worldly-wise, cynical, irreverent, 
assuredly no social moralist in either theory or prac- 
tice, still had his deity, in naming which he became 
grave on the instant, and to preserve the perfect 
image of which he would undoubtedly have turned 
ruthless as a fanatic — throttling habits at the moment 
of their first encroachment, bludgeoning friendships 
proved cumbrous, and stabbing hearts grown over- 
fond. 

Such devotion to art the young man found mag- 
nificent. In viewing that career, it was as if he were 
gazing on a great cliff of coral rock, dashed by the 
waves, yet never shaken, amid all lashing tempests 
teeming with a creative energy that built the summit, 
year by year, to proportions ever nobler. 

The echoes of Pavin’s admonition continued to 
strike on his ears — clear, sane notes piercing a con- 
fusion of futile sounds. Not Mme. Lodbrok’s story 
— since he could not, in vigor, feel prescience of 
disaster any more than of death — but Pavin’s words, 
“Art is its own stimulus,” decided him to try, at 
least, another way of living. 

Felix swore off drinking, then limited himself, as 
once before, to three cigars a day, and finally, feeling 

177 


PREDESTINED 


178 

a spiritual exhilaration as he contemplated absolute 
sobriety, made so many good resolutions that, if he 
had proved able to fulfil them all, his life would have 
been scarcely less hedged about with decorous restric- 
tions than an anchorite’s. 

Then came a morning distinguished by sensations 
of superiority, when he seemed to be looking down 
from a great height on a misguided humankind — a 
swarm of groundlings scrambling about, their noses 
to the earth, in silly, unprofitable, and perverse 
pursuits. 

He quickly found opportunity to make all his 
friends aware, as if by chance, that “he was not 
drinking any more,” that “he smoked very little 
now,” and so on. He insisted on discussing dissipa- 
tion, which, he asserted, “had never yet been good 
for any one, and was particularly bad for those who 
worked with their brains.” In short, he declaimed 
in public, rather than considered in private, his half- 
formed reasonings. 

But his tone of voice was so authoritative, and his 
continent demeanor so imposing, that he gave his 
auditors an impression of strength. Maybe it was 
the memory of old resolves, old struggles, old re- 
lapses, rousing a secret envy in the region of the 
conscience, that so clouded the faces of those listening 
friends of Felix’s. Marie herself, since he seemed to 
have taken her advice, had a thoughtful manner — as 
of one who has found, unexpectedly, a strange ele- 
ment to cope with. 

And now, declared Felix, for work in earnest! 


MARIE 


179 


But his work did not proceed. 

The stimulus that had driven him for months 
withdrawn, that “ stimulus of art,” which was to 
replace it, failed to appear. For art itself had a 
depreciated aspect now, and all the conceptions per- 
taining to it lost their lustre. Just as one emerging 
from a dream full of agreeable illusions is saddened 
to find enclosing him again a dreary and monoto- 
nous reality, so Felix, all his induced enthusiasms 
waning, looked mournfully on an altered world, 
wherein only prosaic features were obtruded. 

He sat -by the hour at his writing-table, listless, 
at gaze, thinking not of literature, but of abjured 
pleasures. All that he had regarded as unprofitable, 
in his burst of zeal, took on again insidiously, in this 
retrospection, its allurements. The arguments which 
he had thrown into the faces of his friends were logi- 
cal no longer. 

What a fool he had been, to run about publish- 
ing his fine intentions! Already he was furtively 
arranging the excuses he might offer, should he 
reappear clothed in his old habits. 

It was the first of June — a mild, sun-drenched 
afternoon made for all sorts of joyous dilatations. 
The air that blew through Felix’s open windows in 
West Thirty-second Street was a draught as intoxi- 
cating as champagne. 

Drab thoughts, long faces, forbidding gestures, 
continence that shrivelled the heart — what had they 
to do with youth in Spring? They belonged to age, 
sitting cold and cramped beside the empty hearth, 


180 PREDESTINED 

shaking its old head dismally, hypocritically, over 
what it could enjoy no longer. 

Pavin himself — a nice pattern for a preacher, even 
now! And in his youth? Little likelihood that he 
had put on so much as a shred of crape till curiosity 
had been jigged to death! 

“That for his fine maxims!” cried Felix, snapping 
his fingers at the writing-table. “ Not a line scratched 
off — that’s what they’re worth! He works best who 
acts like ‘a man of this world’; I can see that, 
clearly!” Old ways lay bathed in roseate light; just 
the determination to speed back to them made him 
himself again. The dog, Pat, bounded round his 
master, barking. 

So ended that experiment. 

Pavin, at least, was not a witness of Felix’s relapse. 
The portrait-painter, his commissions finished, gave 
up his studio in the Velasquez Building and em- 
barked for France. He left with Felix the informa- 
tion that he had recently renewed acquaintance, in 
some fashionable gathering, with “a Mr. Fray,” who, 
on inheriting a fortune from a distant relative, had 
managed with a thousand ingenuities and urbanities 
to work his way up, through various social strata, 
into the most admirable company. Indeed, he was 
even then all but engaged to be married to a girl 
of distinguished family. 

Felix’s hatred of the young dilettante was fanned 
to a more furious flame than ever. That miserable 
shallow-pate, all self-conceit, duplicity, and spite — 
that weak Judas, with his eyes of a sick kitten! 


MARIE 181 

Again Felix longed to get his hands on Mortimer 
Fray’s thin neck. 

He over whose very shoulders, as it seemed, the 
fellow had wriggled into wealth and place, saw him- 
self hardly better off for money than for social status. 

Convinced by Noon’s benevolence that luck would 
extricate him in the nick of time from any quandary, 
he had been extravagant as ever. In six months, to 
be sure, he had banked eighteen hundred dollars, 
earned from the magazines; but who could live 
agreeably, along Broadway, at that rate? 

Noon, on the other hand, having served in the 
beginning to set the pace, was now able to acceler- 
ate it. 

The speculator, sensing financial reverses near 
their origin, as a seafarer senses remotely-gathering 
storms, played the game of stocks so shrewdly that 
his occasional large losses were far exceeded by his 
profits. A born gambler, confident of the ultimate 
success of his luck, judgment, and audacity, he no 
more revealed despondency at a disastrous day than 
triumph at a rich coup. A ponderous air of mastery 
was developing in him at the expense of genial traits. 
His smiles were less amiable, his features in repose 
more grim. His very dissipations — though exceeding 
in prodigality all previous limits — now had in them, 
Felix thought, something reserved and calculating. 

Whenever Noon met the young man, he com- 
plained of “those two girls, with their silly quarrel, 
ending so much good sport.” Surely, he hinted, it 
was Marie’s fault ; for Nora had never in her easy- 


182 


PREDESTINED 


going life been known to nurse a grudge. At last, 
after jerking his head involuntarily half a dozen 
times, Noon would rumble: 

“Felix, why don’t you reason with Marie?” 

But Felix’s ideas in respect of that had changed. 
He saw enough of the speculator as it was. Besides, 
his instinct no longer recognized in Noon, for all the 
latter’s slaps on the back, whispered anecdotes, and 
grins, the eager friendliness of other days. 

The reconciliation was, however, effected without 
Felix’s aid. 

Marie, with compunction for an excuse, donned 
her newest hat and dress, and went to call on Nora. 
Noon, opportunely strolling in toward dinner-time, 
found the two young women together. They had 
“made up”; everything was to be just as formerly! 
The three, driving to Marie’s rooms, burst in upon 
Felix, laughing, bustling, demanding that he snatch 
his hat and come to dinner. His gloom, acquired 
from waiting long alone, was not much abated by 
that tableau. 

So it was that those four found themselves again 
in close association. But for all Nora Llanelly’s 
charms, it was now Marie’s personality that pre- 
vailed. The beauty of the one had been eclipsed, 
in the last few months, by the other’s various devel- 
oping talents. 

No one could well have mistaken Nora’s origin, 
what with her loud laughter, elementary vocabulary, 
ready amazement, and ignorance of everything not 
duplicated in the life of Broadway. But even Felix 


MARIE 183 

had been imposed on by Marie’s conversation and 
behavior. 

And these she was continually improving. 

In public, nothing escaped her: from the slightest 
interplay of manners in which cultivated persons took 
part she got instruction. Moreover, no lesson had to 
be repeated to her. 

Then, in private, whenever Felix touched on a 
topic unfamiliar to her, without betraying lack of 
knowledge, she succeeded in enlightening herself. 
Frequently Felix learned, from her reference to some 
minor usage of polite society, from an opinion recently 
relieved of bourgeois quality, or just from the cor- 
rected pronunciation of a word, that he had taught 
her something. 

Her discourse, always confined to well-learned 
topics, appreciating common subjects from a superior 
view-point, was delivered in a voice free from any 
plebeian accent, well modulated, never loud. It was 
her habit to drink but one glass of champagne: so, 
unlike many of her woman friends, she had no 
lapses from good taste, made no false moves, re- 
vealed no ignorance. She was at pains to show, in 
all situations, that she could “do the right thing.” 
Although she needed no foil now, it was when Nora 
was with her that she shone most brilliantly. 

“That girl,” Felix was assured by Noon, “is going 
to get there.” 

Indeed, she was already “getting there” in several 
ways. Toward the middle of July, she had a nota- 
ble success in her profession. 


184 


PREDESTINED 


“The Silly Season,” Montmorrissy’s new summer 
review, was produced on the roof of the Trocadero 
Theatre. There, beneath the stars, amid clustered 
lamps, palms, grottoes tinkling with cascades, painted 
precipices overhung with growing flowers, an audi- 
ence in summer dress waxed hilarious while gaping 
up at the bright little stage. 

It was a burlesque of the chief happenings of the 
year: in it the affairs of crowned heads, politicians, 
actresses, and a host of persons locally notorious or 
celebrated, were extravagantly travestied. 

From the first moment the action struck a furious 
gait. Scene melted into scene: horse-play was 
swallowed up in exaggerated sentiment, which, in 
turn, was annihilated by a broad joke. The stage 
was one instant full of marching amazons, next 
empty save for the tenor and the prima donna 
gyrating in a swift dance, then, in a flash, filled for 
no particular reason with small girls in the extremity 
of dishabille, who fell to kicking in a way that bade 
fair to disjoint them. Comedians, all plaids and 
grease-paint, bounced through the rout with howls 
in the dialect of the “Tenderloin.” “Show girls” 
came strolling forth in costumes that amazed the 
audience. A dancer, whose further appearance the 
police were expected to prohibit, exercised herself 
till her powder disappeared beneath a flood of 
perspiration. Lights rose and died — as the scenery 
dissolved and took new form — on scurrying choruses 
that glistened half bare skin, half spangles; sunshine, 
moonlight, and all the rich rays of the spectrum, 


MARIE 


185 

played on the painted eyes of singers scattering know- 
ing winks, on broad hands passing over whitened 
shoulders, on comely faces placid at the embraces of 
buffoons as inhuman-looking, in their “ make-up,” as 
gorillas. 

With the progress of that spectacle, in which there 
appeared to be no place for any rational thought, 
a sort of vertiginous enthusiasm was communicated 
to the audience. Applause grew wild; laughter be- 
came hysterical ; men’s eyes expressed their natures ; 
women forgot to look askance; in nearly all faces 
there was something rakish. 

But Felix sat gazing at the stage without a 
smile. 

He saw Marie, slim as a wood-sprite, wrapped 
apparently in nothing but a rose-colored scarf be- 
strewn with golden flowers. The corsage of this 
costume was immoderately low in front and wholly 
lacking behind ; the skirts clung to the young woman 
as if wet; the fringes, a foot in length, swung from 
her knees. 

She had complained of this attire, of certain lines 
in her part, of the general effect that she would have 
to produce. Her ideas, it appeared, had been all for 
a role in which one could preserve some vestiges of 
propriety. She had even gone so far as to tell Felix, 
after the dress rehearsal, that “she had a good mind 
to walk out.” Yet once on the stage, nothing could 
have been more nearly perfect than her serenity. 
She also knew, no doubt, that she had never looked 
so prepossessing. 


1 86 


PREDESTINED 


Her wig, elaborately puffed, set with three golden 
bands, was auburn of the darkest shade. Amid that 
emphatic aureole her face gleamed like a cameo, all 
its decisive lines of cheek and chin but adding to 
the clear-cut beauty of the whole. Her eyes, never 
previously fine, were strangely elongated and lang- 
uishing; her lips, by nature thin, had gained, from 
some new trick with carmine paint, a voluptuous 
contour plausible even at close quarters. To add 
final accent to her air of delicate artificiality, pendent 
ear-rings of coral, carved, like threaded rose-buds, 
were permitted to graze her shoulders. 

She uttered a song with seemingly capricious 
changes from parlando to clear musical tones; she 
filled a dance, in waltz time, with a hundred unex- 
pected, dainty gestures. Made perfect in every note 
and posture by innumerable rehearsals, exhibiting 
with a sure touch all Montmorrissy’s devices as her 
own, she surprised friends and roused the admiration 
of strangers. 

Men searched the programme for her identity, 
bandied her name about, stared at her with critical 
and impudent expressions. And it seemed to Felix 
that all those glances rested on her with a material 
contact. He was like one who sees some belonging, 
of the most intimate associations, exposed, handled, 
and appraised by cynical auctioneers. 

That night, he began to hate Marie’s environ- 
ment. 

But nowadays it seemed as if the only air he could 
breathe was that of the theatre. It filled Broadway, 


MARIE 


187 

permeated all the resorts in which he passed his time, 
penetrated Marie’s apartment, where there seemed 
to cling to the very hangings something of the close, 
cosmetic-laden atmosphere of dressing-rooms. 

There the flatly scandalous note was struck by 
Mattie, the lax-mouthed mulatto maid — who now 
costumed Marie at the theatre and was hand in glove 
with all the other servants — and by Miriam, the 
saturnine hairdresser. From this functionary’s black 
satchel, worn shiny on her questionable rounds, 
seemed to issue with the curling-irons and the 
brushes, as if from a Pandora’s box, all sorts of 
greasy calumnies. The hairdresser was, perhaps, as 
much an unexpurgated gazette as a constructor of 
coiffures. 

There, also, were aired by visiting young women 
attired in their best, the politics of the stage — the 
machinations for advancement, the combinations 
made by spite against popularity, the disparagements 
of talent. Felix grew weary listening to tales of 
the jealousies of actresses, the vanities of actors, the 
despotism of Montmorrissy — to such phrases as, 
“She didn’t get a hand to-night,” “He queered her 
turn with a lot of comic business on the side,” 
“That couple ought to be playing the tank towns,” 
“He always manages somehow to sneak upstage 
and steal the scene,” “She’s had her two weeks’ 
notice from Monty.” Little Felix cared that the 
ugly drummer, whose behavior had once diverted 
him, was discharged for habitual drunkenness, or 
that the young tenor — whose name was Mackeron 


1 88 


PREDESTINED 


— had finally got his wife to divorce him. But Miss 
Qewan, Marie’s gentle friend, was for some obscure 
reason dismissed from the company without warn- 
ing. Marie expressed her indignation to Felix. 

“All those weeks of rehearsing without pay, and 
part of her own wardrobe to buy! Did that matter 
to Monty?” And, with a fixed stare, Marie vehe- 
mently exclaimed: 

“The beast!” 

She hastened to add that every one said the same ; 
for Miss Qewan, “as good a girl as ever stepped,” 
was trying to bring up an eight-year-old sister. 

Felix thought less than ever of Marie’s instructor. 

Whenever he met the manager, he found it hard to 
look politely into that flaccid countenance, cunning, 
self-sufficient, quizzical and reserved by flashes. For 
some reason, Felix always seemed to afford Mont- 
morrissy amusement. Possibly it was the young 
man’s ingenuousness, not yet altogether destroyed by 
the buffets of experience, that entertained the other. 

Then, too, it irked Felix more and more to be 
agreeable in Noon’s company. 

Every day he had to watch the speculator cut a 
fine figure with his inexhaustible wallet. That burly, 
deep-voiced fellow, shaved to the blood, odorous of 
toilet-water, always “dressed to kill,” flashing a great 
ruby and diamond finger-ring every time he raised 
his hand, was surely the most blatant, vulgar creat- 
ure drawing breath. Felix was disgusted with his 
stories of successful gambling, his disregard of money, 
his reckless proposals, his “cock-sure,” masterful 


MARIE 189 

demeanor — in fine, with each act of his beyond 
emulation. 

It was Noon who took the lead in all excursions — 
who telephoned for the table in the restaurant, 
ordered the automobile, harangued the head waiter, 
accepted the courses with a nod, mixed the salad- 
dressing, sent word to the chef, so that “the rascal 
should know whom he was cooking for.” Familiar 
with the city to its farthest outskirts, famous in all 
places of amusement for his generosity, he was, as 
Marie argued, “a comfortable person to have along.” 

Perhaps he conducted them through the night 
to some road-house, surrounded by shrubbery, its 
broad porch, full of dinner tables, encircling it with 
a shining zone, violin tones issuing from its open 
windows to mingle with the songs of crickets and 
katydids. There the proprietor skipped down the 
steps to greet him; waiters recalled his name and 
hovered round him to suggest his favorite dishes; 
orchestra leaders bowed while beating time; ser- 
vility and eagerness filled every face. His departure 
was like the exit of a grand duke incognito. 

The two young women confessed, just by the 
flashing of their eyes, at such parade of respect, how 
inspiriting they, at least, found Noon’s companion- 
ship. 

Every fair Sunday now saw them speeding far 
afield in his red automobile. 

On country roads, they were caressed by the sweet, 
tepid breezes of midsummer. Homesteads nestling 
amid apple-trees, with sheds, bee-hives, the dairy- 


190 


PREDESTINED 


house, the rustic pump, scattered round about, 
evoked from Marie and Nora exclamations of delight. 
They had to pause where lines of willows leaned 
toward a brook, where glassy ponds reflected sky 
and clouds, where water-grass was stirred by zephyrs 
into ripples. Nora wanted to take off her shoes and 
stockings and go in wading, to uproot lily-pads, to 
find a nest with fledglings in it, to ask some farmer 
for a drink of fresh, warm milk. She displayed, in 
those rural regions, the artlessness and excitement of 
a city urchin on his first country outing. She 
scrambled through underbrush regardless of lace 
petticoats — then reappeared with dishevelled tresses, 
with flushed face moist, her skirts studded with burrs, 
her arms laden with coarse, yellow daisies. Marie 
was content to pick a couple of wild rose blossoms 
by the roadside, with which she decorated the lapels 
of Noon’s and Felix’s coats. Sometimes, espying on 
an eminence a charming bit of landscape, she would 
press the young man’s arm, and murmur: 

“Our house ought to be built in such a place?” 

She had grown frank in that respect. 

At dusk, from the pavilions of casinos by the sea, 
they watched remote lights steal across the water 
over a maze of wavering reflections. Stars filled the 
heavens in great patches, like a glittering spawn. 
With ejaculations of triumph, they discovered the 
Great Dipper, the Bear, the ruddy twinkle of the 
planet Mars. Then a realization of the immensity 
of space, of the illimitable field of worlds, of the 
earth’s insignificance, subdued them. They sat 


MARIE 


191 

silent, looking over the water with wistful, vacuous 
expressions. 

In the cool depths of midnight returning at full 
speed, they were lulled to lethargy by the reiteration 
of long, narrow vistas, leafy, streaming, leaping from 
blackness into brilliancy at the flash of their acety- 
lene lamps. Then, midst the obscurity aloft, there 
grew before their tired eyes a tremulous, far-stretch- 
ing radiance — the city’s nimbus. Finally, they 
reached the littered streets, roused themselves at the 
noises of humanity, and, a little sad, penetrated 
the constricted places they called home. 

Through the open windows of Marie’s parlor 
entered the nocturnal racket of Lincoln Square. 
Brakes and gongs of trolley-cars, automobile horns, 
horses’ hoofs, shrill voices, filled the street with 
echoes of that clarity which seems peculiar to Sunday. 
Hot, malodorous exhalations rose from the pave- 
ment, which was covered with broad, sticky-looking 
stains. 

Felix, his various elations worn away, his head 
throbbing painfully, stood by the window. Remem- 
bering the savor of the sea, the perfume of meadows, 
the wafted smells, at nightfall, of invisible wet earth 
and flowers, he suffered as if from a spiritual retro- 
gression. Thus he was invariably drawn back by 
destiny — from the serene, pure reaches of the woods 
and fields to sickly turmoil, from something that 
approached contentment of the heart to feverish 
desires in gratifying which there was more pain than 
pleasure! 


192 


PREDESTINED 


Was he, indeed, himself in this great, stone-bound 
prison of a city, or did he but step in time with 
countless others? Was it his own will that drove 
him through the vortex, or the mingled impulses of 
a million other minds ? How to be one’s own mas- 
ter, how to stand isolate in spirit, unshaken by any 
impact — the cliff with summit high above the surge ? 
Perhaps, far away, buried in the fastnesses of forests, 
or on a mountain side above the clouds, one might, 
like those Brahmin mystics who sit on the peaks 
before the Himalayas, find oneself? He recalled a 
passage from a Persian poem: “There is safety in 
solitude.” And for a moment he glimpsed the wis- 
dom that belongs to age : he wondered if happiness, 
so violently sought, did not consist in peace. 

“For heaven’s sake, Felix, what are you dreaming 
about!” 

With a start, he turned from the window. 

A shaded lamp, of yellow porcelain, made the 
centre table bright, but left the walls in shadow. 
The lower portions alone of the green portieres 
were revealed distinctly; the claw-like feet of chairs 
showed little patches of light; the pattern of the 
rug was emphasized: an intricate design of flowers, 
yellow, green, and blue. Beyond an open door 
appeared, in a dim sleeping-room, a dressing-table. 
The mirror, tilted forward, reflected jars of cold- 
cream, flasks of essence, powder-boxes, crumpled 
handkerchiefs, hat-pins, and combs of tortoise-shell. 

And the odors of benzoine and “ peau d’Espagne ,” 
emanating from that inner chamber, drove out of 


MARIE 


193 

Felix’s brain the last souvenirs of unsophisticated 
country air. 

Those rooms were now the centre-point of his 
existence: to them his thoughts continually turned; 
thither his feet were always leading him; therein 
were forged for him chains of irresolution, pliancy, 
and subservience, which he dragged everywhere, to 
the exhaustion of his individuality. 

He trod the path that led to her with an invariable 
agitation. This nervous disturbance, less pleasur- 
able than discomfortable, increased as he entered 
the hotel, mounted in the elevator to her floor, and 
pressed the bell-button at her threshold. 

The door swung open; Mattie, the maid, with 
lowered eyes, mumbled: “Good evening, Mr. 
Felix” — then shrank into the shadows. Felix trav- 
ersed the short private hallway, knocked on the 
parlor door, parted the green velours curtains, saw 
her again. 

Maybe she was sitting by the window, in a loose 
gown, reading attentively the story of some such 
enterprising person as Mme. du Barry. Without 
laying down her book, calmly smiling, she stretched 
her neck slightly for his kiss. At such moments, her 
self-possession dissatisfied him. 

“My dear boy, don’t you see that my hair is 
dressed for the evening? Did you stop to give the 
photographer a blowing-up, and to get the sheet 
music I wanted ? I’ll wager you forgot those Rus- 
sian cigarettes!” 

He did errands for her, was at her beck and call, 


194 


PREDESTINED 


deferred to her in ah things, suited his hours to her 
convenience, made every sacrifice to please her. In 
short, with his innumerable concessions he crushed 
from his consciousness all sense of freedom. She 
dominated him completely. 

Yet he had none of his old illusions in regard to 
her. He made no more fine speeches concerning 
“her misfortunes,” “the injustice of fate,” “a day 
when she would attain the place that she deserved.” 
Nor was she now at pains to play that part. 

It was no longer necessary. 

Amid his present surroundings — wherein the mar- 
ket-place of the affections largely throve on traffic in 
damaged goods — Felix soon found it reasonable to 
cherish what was not apparently excelled about him. 
In Rome, as it were, he did after the fashion of the • 
Romans; and, without much surprise at the deterio- 
ration of his sentiments, he learned that he could 
expend no less extravagant an ardor on the tawny, 
speckled lily at hand than if it were the rare, white 
flower of his early dreams. 

But he had to pay, in consequence, the penalty of 
jealousy. 

The enigma of Marie’s past tormented him: he 
tried to solve it by all sorts of devices. He became 
adept in leading a conversation deviously to perilous 
ground, where Marie might, by some slip, reveal a 
little of her secret. He grew shrewd in deciphering 
the looks, gestures, silences, which followed his innu- 
endoes, in comparing present with past utterances, in 
putting two and two together. His mind was a 


MARIE 


195 


repository for scraps of information dropped by her 
at random, from which he hoped to piece out some 
day a coherent history of her career. 

He wondered if he might not have learned a good 
deal about her from Pavin, in whose studio he had 
met her. But this seemed unlikely : the Frenchman 
had never shown enough interest in her to discuss 
her willingly. At any rate, Felix might question 
women unfriendly to her; then, too, Nora Llanelly 
was “such a fool it would not be hard to pump her”; 
while Mattie, who had “worked for Miss Sinjon 
before,” could probably be bribed. 

Nevertheless, he neglected these opportunities, less 
from shame than from a conviction that Marie would 
find him out. 

Occasionally, he seemed on the point of learning 
something definite. She had said so-and-so; at a 
remark of his she had looked thus; at a certain 
query she had shown agitation, had risen from one 
chair to take another farther from him, while exclaim- 
ing angrily, “You promised me once that you would 
let all that sort of thing alone!” Such actions surely 
meant that he was on the right track. 

She had undoubtedly known some one with such 
and such qualities, with an appearance of this and 
that sort. A certain man in her life, for instance, 
had been an inordinate consumer of cigarettes, fastid- 
ious in his apparel, of excellent manners, well-read, 
fond of the arts, indeed, a dilettante and a collector — 
yes, a collector of fine prints! To such details did 
Felix’s ingenuity assist him. 


PREDESTINED 


196 

The conjecture of one day became next morning 
a certainty: nothing was too extravagant for belief 
after it had aged a night. Now and then, when 
intoxicated, Felix looked at Marie craftily, with half- 
shut eyelids, thinking: “I know a great deal more 
about you than you imagine.” In his opinion, it was 
a kind of struggle between them. 

But for what guerdon ? 

From his machinations Felix got nothing but 
unhappiness. No sooner had he discovered in her 
past, as he believed, some new detail to her detri- 
ment, than he was pierced with anguish. While 
lying awake at night — when his ingenuity seemed at 
its best — a fresh conviction, flashing forth at the 
plausible union of half a dozen surmises, frightened 
him as much as if a cold hand had reached out of 
the darkness and clutched him by the throat. 

“ Yes, yes, whoever that fellow was, she must have 
been in love with him! At least, he had surely been 
in love with her!” And Felix’s relations with her 
could be nothing but a repetition — who knew but an 
inferior repetition! No doubt he was suffering all 
the while by comparison. 

It was not to be expected that the young man’s 
jealousy should fail to invade the present. 

Every breath of gossip that reached him bore hint 
of trust betrayed in the lives round about. He noted 
the gullibility of infatuated men, the security of 
secrets known by all save one. He remembered 
Gregory Tamborlayne. 

Thereupon he became preternaturally alert. His 


MARIE 


197 


eyes were on Marie whenever she spoke to any one. 
He even visited her at unexpected moments. A 
cloud of cigarette smoke in her rooms seemed por- 
tentous, but it was only “Nora and some other girls 
who had just left.’ > An afternoon newspaper of 
sedate tendency, lying on the centre table, made his 
heart beat fast: she had never bought it; who had 
left it there? 

“They’re always sending up the wrong newspaper 
from the office. What’s the matter with you ? I 
never saw such a face! Why, one might think ” 

“I was just wondering if you had changed your 
brand of news.” 

“That’s not the truth! I can read you like a 
book. And let me tell you, people never have such 
thoughts unless they give good cause for the same 
kind!” 

While looking at him steadily, her green eyes 
became vacant. Her lips gradually parted in a 
smile. Her rapt expression was new to him. After 
some moments, she inquired, absent-mindedly: 

“What would you do if you found some one?” 

For an instant he could not believe his ears. Was 
it she who had said such a thing? 

At last, his lips quivering, he answered, in a low 
voice full of sarcasm: 

“Nothing, of course!” 

Her eyes seemed to wake, her smile disappeared. 
She made haste to slip her arms round him. 

“ Oh, you poor boy, I’m so sorry ! You take every- 
thing the wrong way ! I was only joking; the idea of 


PREDESTINED 


198 

such a thing seemed so ridiculous. If you only knew 
how foolish you are to have such thoughts!” 

But from that day he had a definite apprehen- 
sion. 

He even went so far as to consider what role it 
would be proper for him to take in such a scene. 
He scanned the ground carefully, like a man about 
to fight a duel. In the top drawer of her dressing- 
table, under a pile of handkerchiefs, she kept an extra 
key to her hall door. Felix abstracted it. 

One afternoon, a craftiness developed by numer- 
ous cocktails urged him to use this key. Just as he 
slipped into the private hallway, he heard her clear 
voice raised beyond the curtains: 

“Do you think I keep papers of that sort about me ? 
They’re in my safe-deposit box. And rest assured, 
they’ll come out only when you’ve made up your 
mind about them.” 

Felix tore the green portieres apart. She turned, 
perceived him, and, with a gesture that at least 
seemed deliberate, hung up the telephone receiver. 
Her eyes did not relinquish his. 

“You? How did you get in?” 

“The door was unlatched.” 

“That careless Mattie again!” 

“So, you have a safe-deposit box with papers in 
it? What papers? Who was that telephoning?” 

She smiled pityingly, shrugged her shoulders, and 
turned away, the ruffles of her dove-colored dressing- 
gown slowly tumbling after her. 

“Well, my dear, it was Montmorrissy telephoning, 


MARIE 


199 

and ‘the papers’ are my contract. I should hate to 
have your disposition!” 

She soon took to parrying such attacks with insinu- 
ations of her own — then, forcing the fighting, always 
managed to get in the first thrust. Felix, on the 
defensive, had to free himself from the most extraor- 
dinary accusations. He was compelled to account 
for every hour of his time — to tell her whom he had 
met, where he had lunched, what streets he had 
passed through. She declared that he flirted with 
every girl in sight ; she harped on “ that black-haired 
woman, that old flame of his,” whom she “knew all 
about.” Their squabbles invariably ended with 
the cry: 

“I’m sure you’re dying to go straight back to your 
black-haired friend ! Very well, run on ! I suppose 
I shall survive it.” 

She knew, no doubt, that he never dared to leave 
her presence without patching up their quarrel. 

At the coming of autumn, he remembered the 
September of the previous year. 

How bright had seemed the promise of regions 
then unexplored, to-day attained! Had he not told 
himself that happiness lay on the horizon ? {Ie had 
covered the ground, had reached the place of his 
desires, to find the horizon as far away as ever. 

Pleasures, it seemed, grew vague at his approach; 
at his embrace they melted into nothingness, as 
nymphs — one is told — were wont to do when in 
archaic woods surprised at twilight. No moment of 
gratification was as he had pictured it. 


200 


PREDESTINED 


When had he been really happy? 

One dull October day, he entered Washington 
Square, sat down upon a bench, looked northward 
toward Fifth Avenue and the Ferrol house. 

Clouds of pulverized plaster enveloped the familiar 
dwelling. Through that pall loomed dump-carts, 
scaffolds, laborers in canvas overalls. The upper 
story was gone; the house was being torn down. 

He walked slowly away. Round his feet flut- 
tered withered leaves, such as old men near by, in 
faded blue, were feebly raking into little heaps. 

He saw, on another path, a woman looking at him, 
hesitating timidly. Her large, lustrous eyes woke 
memories. Was it she who had interrupted his 
supper-party on Christmas eve ? The woman made 
up her mind to bow. Yes, it was she. He raised 
his hat, passed on, and soon forgot her. 

Considerably before his usual hour, Felix reached 
the hotel in Lincoln Square. Passing through the 
lobby, he entered an elevator — one of two that ran 
up and down in the same shaft. The cars passed 
each other in mid-air. Felix caught a glimpse of a 
thin-shouldered, pale young man in brown, weighing 
in one hand a bulky packet of letters at which he 
was gazing with a sneer. 

It was Mortimer Fray. 

A gush of blood blinded Felix and almost raised 
him off his feet. 

“Stop the car! Take me down again.” 

He stepped out into the lobby, glared round, 
gained the street entrance, confronted the carriage- 


MARIE 


201 


starter. “Yes, a strange gentleman in a brown suit 
had left, this very moment, in a hansom.” 

The fellow, his weather-beaten face exhibiting 
solicitude, made bold to add: 

“You don’t look well, sir. Begging your pardon, 
you’d best have a little something for it.” 

Felix turned away. In the lobby, people were 
moving quietly to and fro on their sane affairs. They 
recalled him to himself. What had he thought to do 
in such a place? 

The reaction to common-sense exhausted him. 
With an effort, he made his way upstairs and appeared 
before Marie. 

She, turning from the window, stared at him 
aghast. 

“What is it? What has happened?” 

If he told her anything of Fray, he would be drained 
forthwith of every secret in his life — the stories of 
Eileen, of Nina, worst of all, of his ruined prospects. 
Throwing himself into a chair, he answered: 

“Just an old enemy I’ve run across. What of 
that? The world is full of enemies.” 

She approached him slowly, hesitated, then knelt 
beside him. She looked away. She uttered, as if 
suffocating: 

“Not here, Felix.” 

His heart was touched. 

“No, not here, Marie.” 

Presently he clasped her close. Something crackled 
in the bosom of her dress. 


202 


PREDESTINED 


“What was that?” he asked, listlessly. 

She closed her eyes. 

“That ? I don’t know. It must be my last week’s 
salary.” 


CHAPTER X 


In the bleak transparency of public parks and the 
early dusk pierced by a thousand lofty window lights, 
in the quickened activity of amusement districts and 
the return of elegance to finer thoroughfares, Felix 
saw only uneventful repetition. At last, even amid 
excess he had discovered monotony. 

Sometimes he was tormented by unconscionable 
desires. 

He dreamed of environments remote in place and 
time, freed from all the restraints of modern, civilized, 
or even rational, society, in which abandonment to 
pleasure had reached transcendence. His mind’s eye 
perceived such pictures as took shape round banquet 
tables in the Golden House of Nero, where, on a dais 
rising like an island from a sea of revellers, the im- 
perial purple was smothered beneath rose-petals, 
ivory-white arms, and gold dust shaken from di- 
shevelled locks. Or else his fancy conjured up the 
Hanging Gardens of Babylon, in which the dawn, 
as if stealing over a field where had been waged to 
the death some appalling combat of the senses, struck 
through a reek of incense fumes upon an acre of 
spilled wine, torn garlands, fallen diadems, prone 
bodies laden with barbaric jewels and gleaming 
under silvery meshes and nets of threaded pearls. 

203 


204 


PREDESTINED 


How tremendous, yet how exquisitely embellished, 
the debaucheries of those pagan times! Again, and 
now for a new reason, the young man was rendered 
melancholy by thought of epochs ended so many 
centuries too soon. A longing for irrevocable days 
made his eyes swim with tears. 

By persistent excitation of his nerves, Felix had 
increased his emotional instability till trifling thoughts 
were able to rouse in him not only ardors, but also 
irritation, anger, fear, despondency. Since his equi- 
librium was now so easily upset, any sudden crisis in 
which he had especial need of calmness was sure to 
catch him at a disadvantage. Marie, armed cap-a- 
pie with self-possession, had the best of him in every 
clash. 

Their altercations increased in frequency and vio- 
lence. For Felix’s jealousy grew with Marie’s popu- 
larity. 

As he observed the development of public interest 
in her, it seemed to him that he was already sharing 
something of her with a host of others. When he 
considered those who now made a point of greet- 
ing her courteously everywhere — men of affairs, of 
money, of accomplished deeds — he was consumed 
with fear: if it came to the worst, what rivalry could 
he oppose to them? In hours when the green por- 
tieres had been drawn against the world, his appre- 
hensions wrung from him the cry : 

“ Swear that you love me and no one else!” 

“ Foolish, foolish boy! Must I still swear to that? 
Will you never be sure ? Why do you look at me so ? ” 


MARIE 


205 


What was more nearly Sphynx-like than the face of 
the beloved, when seen through the film of jealousy? 
What was behind those eyes that stared straight into 
his, while the lips, barely moving, uttered reassuring 
words? Those eyes, were they false? Those lips, 
did they lie? How could he be sure of her so close 
to him, yet — because speech and visage can hide 
everything — so remote? 

Frequently, unable to contain himself on feeling 
conjecture turning to conviction, he charged her 
incoherently with all the infamies of his imagination. 
His fury distorted her before his eyes: she, whose 
every feature he had but a little while before adored, 
took on the appearance of a perfidious enemy. He 
could almost have throttled this woman just released 
from his arms. 

Marie, leaning back, turning up her eyes des- 
pairingly, would utter, in shocked accents: 

“Good heavens, what a wicked heart he has! 
What insanity !” 

“I won't afflict you with it any longer!" 

“No doubt that’s the best thing." 

“Good-by!" 

But within the hour he had returned, exhausted, 
crushed, to save the fragments of his pride mumbling 
something about “his promise, made long ago, not 
to leave her alone." 

Disregarding that rigmarole, turning from him 
with a hopeless gesture, she retorted: 

“And your insults, that you forget? What have I 
done to deserve them?" 


206 


PREDESTINED 


“It was my love for you that made me, as you say, 
insane. Surely you’ll forgive me on that account?” 

But she held him off with her white arms, the 
strength of which invariably surprised him. Her 
resolute face was like the countenance of an outraged 
divinity. 

“You were wrong? You were wicked?” 

“Yes, yes! I was wrong. I treated you ter- 
ribly!” 

“More terribly than you suspect. Such words 
leave scars. Afterward, it’s never quite the same.” 

“Ah,” he cried, in acute distress, “don’t say that, 
Marie!” 

So each reconciliation left her stronger, him 
weaker. 

It was he who now harped on “a little place, far 
away, amid trees and roses, just for two.” All his 
instinctive scruples had succumbed to passion; he 
was ready to pay the price implied for surcease of 
anxiety. As one lost in the desert gazes toward the 
flowering mirage, so Felix, in the city, contemplated 
the thought of some remote, verdant region where 
the haze of evening, gemmed with infrequent, mellow 
twinklings, might wrap him gradually in peace. Who 
knew but that in such a spot two hearts might be 
renewed — two natures, beneath the solemn spread 
of stars, together turn to simple and immaculate, 
desires? An end, then, at any rate, to the theatre 
and its publicity, to Broadway and its provocations — 
no more thereafter of associates such as Nora 
Llanelly and Noon! 


MARIE 


207 

Marie had come to share at least a part of his 
antipathy. She was beginning to dislike Nora. 

When alone with Felix, she mimicked maliciously 
her old-time friend’s coquettish airs, impetuous table 
manners, unconscious illiteracy, satisfaction in con- 
spicuous attire. If Nora presented herself in a par- 
ticularly striking costume, Marie, scrutinizing her 
every appurtenance in a single glance, would exclaim, 
“My dear, isn’t that the hat you wore in ‘The Lost 
Venus’?” or, “Oh, my dear, you must really put 
those violets out!” Miss Llanelly received such 
thrusts in bewilderment. If she chanced to take 
offence, it was only for a moment ; with her, flushes 
of mortification were succeeded by good-humored 
smiles as quickly as in children’s faces. She appeared 
to have no place in her broad bosom for rancor; she 
had even forgiven Marie her professional success. 
One evening, she informed Felix confidentially that 
Marie was “getting cranky on account of overwork.” 
The girl should have left “The Silly Season” for a 
little vacation when cold weather forced the review 
from the Trocadero roof down into the auditorium. 

Marie’s disfavor did not as yet extend to Noon. 
She had discreet smiles for all his anecdotes, intelli- 
gent attention for his discursions in aesthetics, keen 
interest in his reports of speculation. He obtained 
her ear especially when, leaning well across a table 
with cigar smoke curling round his jowls, he described 
to her, between involuntary twitchings of his head, 
the career she might have on the stage, did theatrical 
managers but realize her capabilities. 


208 


PREDESTINED 


“Any one ought to see what you could do if you 
had a proper chance. I’m continually talking about 
it to Montmorrissy.” 

That personage was planning to produce in mid- 
winter, at the Castle Theatre, a new musical extrav- 
aganza called “The Queen of Hearts.” This being 
a side venture, in which he was experimenting with 
some unknown authors and musical composers, he 
wanted to fill the stage with inexpensive, if unnoted, 
actors. One day, Noon burst in upon Marie and 
Felix, flourishing cane and gloves, his cigar point 
threatening his eyebrows, his long coat-tails in com- 
motion. He had just left Montmorrissy ! The parts 
in “The Queen of Hearts” were all assigned! The 
prima donna’s role was Marie’s! 

Noon’s grin seemed to add for him, “Thanks 
chiefly to me.” Felix wished that the fellow had 
dropped dead with his tidings in his throat. There, 
as he watched the light of ambition blaze up in 
Marie’s eyes, his dreams of escape into the country- 
side disintegrated. He saw himself, in future as in 
present, the prisoner, the victim, of the city. 

And the city, as he now knew it, was already taking 
heavy tribute of him. 

His excesses were depriving him of an accurate 
conception of propriety, in regard not only to his 
conduct, but also to his literary efforts. 

It befell that a girl friend of Marie’s suddenly died. 
Into the chamber of death, banked with flowers sent 
by contrite women, came hurrying half a dozen 
saddened men, all well-to-do, strangers each to each, 


MARIE 


209 


who, meeting in the fragrant gloom, stared at one 
another, at first indignantly, then suspiciously, finally 
sheepishly. The secrets that the fair deceased had 
kept in life were there revealed. 

“What a tale!” thought Felix. “How full of the 
irony of existence, how human, how beautiful!” He 
rushed off to the studio, seized pen and paper, and 
commenced what he believed was going to be the 
most wonderful short story in the world. But when 
he had written half a dozen pages, there came to him 
the query: 

“What magazine in this country would print it?” 

And gloomily he remembered a great public whose 
sense of moral proportions he had once shared, but 
now had nearly lost. 

Yet he was long in realizing that the cynicism 
developed by his mode of living was affecting his 
work. The ideas, not extraordinary so far as he 
could see, which now moved him to exercise his 
talents, proved to be such as editors of magazines 
regarded with distrust. His stories came back to 
him ; from the envelopes that he tore apart fluttered 
letters of regret, instead of checks. 

By such rebuffs Felix was plunged into despond- 
ency. Could he have been mistaken in himself? 
Were all his dreams of eminence to result in nothing ? 
His energy failed; his writing-table grew dusty ; his 
balance at the bank was near exhaustion. 

The studio in West Thirty-second Street became a 
place of dying aspirations. Through tedious, gray 
days, when snow in its descent made wavering 


210 


PREDESTINED 


shrouds about the windows, Felix bade good-by 
forever, as he thought, to his most precious hopes. 
Stretched on a divan, he seemed to see passing in the 
twilight all the pageantry of literary genius’s crea- 
tions. There, in the midst of apparitions still more 
vague, showed the flame-licked robes of Dante and 
of Virgil, Don Quixote’s basin-helm and cuirass, the 
little breast of Juliet, Salammbo’s jewelled forehead, 
the ardent eyes of Lucien de Rubempre, whose desire 
it was “to be famous, to be loved.” Felix, who had 
so vehemently desired love and fame, watched these 
phantoms — the children of great brains — glide on 
athwart the shadows, their gaze fixed straight ahead, 
their pace unhesitating, their ranks already full. No 
place among them for another; no vigor or wit to 
force a place! He turned his face to the wall, and, 
as if life had ended there, surrendered to despair. 
The white bull-terrier thrust a cold nose against his 
cheek. 

Felix could no longer bear to spend an hour 
unnecessarily in the studio. While Marie was per- 
forming in “The Silly Season,” he wandered on 
Broadway. Under arc lamps, he watched crowds 
entering theatres. From automobiles stepped young 
girls, bareheaded, slight, trailing fur-lined cloaks light 
blue and pink, looking round with the eager eyes 
of innocence. Felix paused to contemplate them, 
then roused himself, passed on, and entered a cafe. 

Every night, he sought systematically, and ob- 
tained, a counterfeit of satisfaction, a false jaunti- 
ness, such insensibility as bordered on oblivion. 


MARIE 


2 1 1 


Sometimes, he moved in a light-shot mist that, clear- 
ing now and then, revealed the supper-table before 
him, the shirt bosoms of waiters, Marie's white, 
square chin and wandering eyes, men rising and 
bowing, women with red lips slightly curled in envy 
whispering behind their glittering fingers. Between 
such lucid intervals, Felix had little accurate knowl- 
edge of his conduct, which, however, would seem to 
have contained itself automatically within decorous 
bounds. Occasionally, his whole recollection of an 
evening was composed of insignificant vignettes, such 
as a moment’s conversation with a stranger, a dis- 
pute — incited by Marie — about a supper-bill, the 
joke of a cab-driver, the pinched face of a child from 
whom, just before dawn, he had bought a Sunday 
newspaper. 

Or perhaps he was late in reaching the theatre. 

The surly keeper of the stage door, before darken- 
ing the hallway and locking up, was taking a last look 
in a cracked mirror at a wart-like protuberance on 
the end of his nose. Enraged at being discovered in 
this vanity, the fellow growled that “she had gone, 
with Mr. Noon or some one else.” 

Felix had a sudden faintness, a contraction near 
the solar plexus, a touch of nausea. He hailed a 
hansom cab. Hurried from one restaurant to an- 
other, he calmed himself with an effort before ques- 
tioning imperturbable head waiters. 

“Miss Sinjon left here half an hour ago with Miss 
Llanelly and Mr. Noon.” 

He breathed again. 


212 


PREDESTINED 


At times, he pondered his condition well-nigh 
impersonally. “ These frail, pale creatures, indeed! 
To think how one of them, whom we met one day 
long ago without any premonition, can become at 
last a terrible tyrant, from whose tyranny there is no 
escape !” 

In the loneliest recesses of Central Park, sur- 
rounded by melting snow, naked underbrush full of 
evening vapors, gaunt tree-tops fading to a blur 
against the dusk, Felix asked himself again the pur- 
poses of human sojourn. In withered grasses and 
dead leaves he found an answer sufficiently pessi- 
mistic for his mood; it was always from quickly- 
perishing, apparently vain aspects of Nature that 
he now drew material wherewith to construct his 
theories. 

Darkness drove back, from distant thickets, the 
dog, Pat, muddy and scratched, weary after foolish 
quests, yet with wagging tail and eager tongue dis- 
playing his certainty of Felix’s caress. The master 
envied the dumb beast. 

He longed for a sympathetic confidant. If Paul 
Pavin, at whose solicitude he had snapped his fingers, 
were only near! But the Frenchman was not coming 
to America that winter. 

To Oliver Corquill, whom he met by chance at the 
entrance of the park, the young man was impelled to 
relate something of his literary reverses and his dis- 
may. When he had concluded with a wholesale 
complaint so rambling as to be hardly intelligible 
even to him, the novelist said, kindly: 


MARIE 


213 


“Why not come away with me for a month’s 
shooting in Maine?” 

The forest fastnesses! Then, remembering Marie, 
he answered that he could not afford it. Corquill 
offered to lend him a couple of hundred dollars. 

A thrill passed through Felix’s body. He stam- 
mered his thanks. 

“Then you’ll come?” 

“Why, the fact is, if your offer held good anyhow, 
I could work here now, I think.” 

The light in Corquill’s eyes was extinguished. 

“As you choose.” 

That was a narrow escape: the balance at the 
bank was overdrawn! But what was two hundred 
dollars? Felix, with the effrontery of desperation, 
penetrated Broad Street and called on Mr. Wickit. 

He was admitted into the office carpeted with green 
Wilton, full of black tin boxes and volumes bound in 
yellow leather. The gray-haired lawyer, without 
rising, pointed to a mahogany chair. His angular, 
sallow face did not relax; his sharp eyes examined 
rapidly the visitor’s physiognomy and clothing. 
Felix, once in the presence of this glum-visaged cred- 
itor, wondered what madness had impelled him 
thither. He had difficulty in beginning his prelim- 
inary speech, which, as he uttered it, appeared to 
him absurd. 

“Perhaps, by this time, it had been found that 
there was at least a little money due him? He 
seemed to remember that Mr. Wickit had written 
him some sort of note, which he had been prevented 


214 


PREDESTINED 


from answering by various misfortunes. Could the 
lawyer have communicated with him on account of 
good news ? Felix sincerely hoped so: a young man 
did not find money growing on bushes in a big city.” 

Mr. Wickit, assuming a smile of commiseration, 
explained : 

“My dear sir, there is nothing new in regard to 
your poor father’s estate. The three letters that I 
wrote to you, over a year ago, were about quite 
another matter.” 

Felix, with burning cheeks, plunged into his next 
manoeuvre. 

“Then it was about the thousand dollars? You 
shall have it, at the earliest possible moment. I’ve 
not done so well as I expected. Indeed, I’m wonder- 
ing where my current expenses are to come from. 
But when I get a start ” 

“I understand. However, you can hardly expect 
me to do anything further in that line?” 

Felix, rising, his spirits in his boots, made haste 
to murmur denial of such a thought. The lawyer’s 
last comment, dryly delivered, was: 

“What a pity you threw away your chance with 
Mrs. Droyt.” 

“With whom?” 

“Mrs. Denis Droyt, of course. Miss Ferrol that 
was.” 

Felix, toiling home through the falling snow, had in 
payment for his pains this new chagrin. 

And he, who had practically thrown them into 
each other’s arms, who was responsible for the amal- 


MARIE 


215 


gamation of their two fortunes, remained at his wits’ 
end for money! He even requested a loan of Noon. 

The speculator reluctantly produced from his fat 
wallet fifty dollars. But on a second occasion, clear- 
ing his throat deliberately, looking fixedly at some 
distant object, he rumbled: 

“I haven’t got it on me.” 

Felix went to a pawnshop on Sixth Avenue. 

When within sight of the three gilt balls suspended 
over the doorway, he slackened his pace, and began 
to look intently into shop windows. Arriving before 
the pawnbroker’s showcases, he stopped, simulated 
interest, put on a whimsical smile — at last, as if seized 
with a playful desire for exploration, marched boldly 
in. When the dejected-looking customers had all 
departed, he produced, with a sensation of shame, a 
pair of valuable cuff-links. The niggardly estimate 
of the usurer amazed him. 

His watch and fob, pearl shirt-buttons, rings, 
cravat-pins, and gold cigarette-case, were one by one 
relinquished in the little, cluttered shop, where the 
air, as it seemed to Felix, was charged with hostility 
generated through years of heartless bargaining and 
sullen acquiescence. He told Marie that his watch 
was being repaired, or that Noon’s parade of precious 
stones had disgusted him with jewelry. 

Marie compressed her lips. 

If he could only confess to her his long-continued 
fraud, implore forgiveness, patience, temporary fru- 
gality, enlist such compassionate support as ought to 
issue from true love! But the many cynical concep- 


2l6 


PREDESTINED 


tions engendered by his jealousy had so affected him, 
that now he was never sure enough of her attachment 
to put so great a strain upon it. To reveal to her, 
who had already learned his every temperamental 
shortcoming, all his material inadequacies as well, 
would, he felt, have been to strip himself of his last 
worldly value. Constantly dreading formidable ri- 
valry, he continued his deceit : he went on regretting 
glibly that “his family estate was not yet in his 
hands,” or that “his quarterly income was used up 
too soon.” While adding invention to invention, he 
trusted that Providence would shower him in the 
nick of time, as formerly, with some miraculous 
windfall. 

Once, in the midst of his distraction, he asked him- 
self, was he not greatly like some antique devotee of 
Moloch, who, before a towering, brazen image of the 
divinity, hurled into the flames his treasure, his birth- 
right, his very offspring, while adoring, half in terror, 
half in aberrant ecstasy, the impassive idol which 
was to pay him for his sacrifice in currency of ruin 
and blighted hopes? 

But from the full measure of his sacrifice Felix 
could see no way of escape. Before his idol, his heart 
was burning. Long practice of excess had driven 
from his mind the contemplative and comparative 
forms of thought by aid of which the temperate 
protect themselves. With all the irrationality of the 
nervous sufferer clinging ever the more desperately 
to that which threatens his destruction, Felix saw, in 
a world full of distorted images, nothing so precious 


MARIE 


217 

as the pellucid skin, the fragrant hair, the red mouth 
of the beloved. 

On her return home tired from a day’s rehearsing, 
she occupied the couch, while Felix, sitting beside 
her, gazed into her face. Her quivering lashes, her 
pulsing throat, the almost imperceptible flush that 
gathered round her cheek-bones, were for him ex- 
traordinary manifestations. A mist obscured his 
sight; in a choked voice he uttered: 

“ Don’t move! How beautiful you are now!” 

And, afflicted with faintness, hypnotized, as it were, 
by her glimmering face, he stammered that she was 
like a lily drooping from its own sweetness — that the 
room was filled with an indefinable, perilous emana- 
tion of her beauty. 

At this flattery, gently she shook her head, then, 
opening her eyes, gave him a prolonged, humid look. 
A beam of light gradually bisected the shadows of 
the ceiling ; the door swung open ; Mattie, the maid, 
tiptoed in to light the lamp and arrange her mistress’s 
coiffure. Becoming proficient at this office, she had 
finally replaced Miriam. The hairdresser had re- 
ceived her discharge with resentment. 

Window-shades were drawn; the dressing-table 
was illumined ; odors of heated hair and brilliantine 
were spread about. While at work, the mulatto, 
shrugging her shoulders, recounted in scornful tones 
whatever she had gleaned from other servants con- 
cerning the spite of actresses to whom Marie had 
been preferred. The mistress, with an inscrutable 
smile, remarked: 


2l8 


PREDESTINED 


“It seems I’m finding out my friends, through 
'The Queen of Hearts.’” 

Preparations for that extravaganza proceeded 
rapidly. On Marie’s dressing-table, amid the silver 
and the perfumes, were now always scattered the 
typewritten pages of her part; her so^igs, roughly 
scored by hand, trailed over the piano. She spent 
hours reiterating musical phrases or repeating lines; 
she always paused before her mirror to try a gesture 
or to practise a smile. Sometimes, Felix entered her 
parlor to find her, with skirts pinned up, posturing 
before the cheval-glass. Noticing him only by a 
contraction of her brows, she *would, perhaps, press 
her hands against her breast, and, looking upward 
with a sweet, wondering expression of innocence, 
exclaim, in a clear voice: 

“Is it a dream? Can there be anything so lovely 
in the world?” 

She was to represent a sort of Cinderella, a found- 
ling discovered, one morning after a terrific storm, 
before the hut of an old witch in a forest. Brought 
up a drudge, wearing rags which could not hide her 
charms, whenever her taskmistress was elsewhere 
astride a broomstick she hugged the hearth, dreamed 
of the unknown, contrived games of “ make-believe ” 
by aid of a pack of tattered playing-cards. One 
evening, as she was falling asleep, the strewn cards 
began to move, to grow, to change into strange, living 
creatures. They thronged round her: would she 
come with them? She assented; the hut dissolved, 
and, in its stead, appeared a dazzling realm called 


MARIE 


219 


“Cardland,” where rose palaces of pasteboard and 
minarets of poker chips. But this place, where all 
should have been gay, was gloomy: years before, a 
great storm, while blowing down the palaces, had 
whisked from her cradle and carried off the new-born 
daughter of the King of Hearts. The King being 
forced into retirement by his grief, the pack was 
thenceforth incomplete, and all the games of “ Card- 
land’’ had to be abandoned. However, on the lost 
infant there had been hidden beneath swaddling- 
clothes a heart-shaped birthmark ; and presently, on 
the fair visitor from the forest this birthmark was, in 
an interesting way, discovered. Forthwith, the King 
recovered, and the deck again entire, all ended with 
a ballet in which, amid a rain of golden coins, vari- 
ous combinations of poker and bridge whist were 
formed by the evolutions of the card folk. 

Montmorrissy did not know how his public would 
receive so innocent a conceit. He was tempted to 
interpolate, by way of precaution, a few local, 
“ up-to-date, ” indecorous incidents. Occasionally 
appearing at rehearsals, he watched the action as 
narrowly as if it were a conspiracy against his pocket- 
book. 

All day long they rehearsed “The Queen of 
Hearts” in an old hall on Sixth Avenue, up two 
flights of stairs, using a loft with discolored walls, a 
low ceiling stained by leaks, and a bare, splintery 
floor. Whenever the pianist, hired for the rehearsals, 
stopped his exertions, one could hear trains rum- 
bling on the elevated railway. At the passage of 


220 


PREDESTINED 


expresses, violent concussions shook the building; 
all voices were drowned; the players closed their 
mouths, dropped their arms, and waited. 

Felix wondered how any merit could be evolved 
from such confusion and incertitude as were there 
displayed. The diminutive dancing-girls called “po- 
nies/’ in their blouses and short skirts, the “show 
girls” with their furs, feathers, and gilt purses, the 
chorus men in their wasp-waisted coats slashed with 
diagonal pockets according to a Broadway style, the 
fat comedian, the slender tenor, the soubrette, and 
Marie, turned helpless eyes toward the stage man- 
ager. This despot seemed to contain all the zeal 
and intelligence in the assembly. With his coat 
off, his collar wilted, his bald head shining, he fell 
back in scrutiny, rushed forward in reproof, with a 
word corrected erroneous ideas, with a gesture con- 
jured up imagination. He lumbered round the room 
in ironical imitation of some clumsy “show girl,” 
listened with a sarcastic smile to the enunciation of 
choruses, snatched individuals from corners where 
they were practising dance-steps, herded the com- 
pany together, ordered the whole act begun again. 
When the ordeal was ended, he declared, to Felix’s 
amazement, that “the thing was taking shape.” 

As the crowd disintegrated, girls lingered to read, 
from a bulletin tacked on the door, the names and 
prices of hotels in Boston. The extravaganza was 
going to that city for a week before beginning in 
New York. 

Rehearsals were transferred to the Castle Theatre. 


MARIE 


221 


On the stage stripped of scenery, with oblong frames 
of canvas piled against the brick wall at the rear, 
the performers, used to rehearsing in a hall, had 
difficulty in manoeuvring toward the centre of the 
footlights. All the concerted pieces were thrown 
into confusion, and forty young women, huddled 
together awkwardly, listened with vacuous smiles to 
the rasping voice of Montmorrissy denouncing them 
from the obscurity of the auditorium. 

As the first-night approached, disquieting rumors 
flew about. A rival manager, from whose ranks 
Montmorrissy had wheedled some attractive “show 
girls,” was going to retaliate by stealing the best 
“business” of “The Queen of Hearts.” Moreover, 
at the last moment the comedian did not seem suffi- 
ciently comic, while the young tenor, Mackeron, who 
was having trouble with his throat, could not bring 
himself to give up cigarettes. In the wings, a boyish 
physician, employed to look after the “ponies” when 
they fainted from their exertions, was always spray- 
ing the tenor’s larynx with an atomizer. 

The dress-rehearsal, with full orchestra, began at 
midnight on Saturday and continued without inter- 
ruption till late Sunday afternoon. Marie returned 
home white as death, with purple streaks beneath 
her eyes, scarcely able to talk. “No one liked the 
show. Every one was blue. Monty had never left 
off growling. So, according to the superstition, it 
should be a success.” 

On Monday morning, the company was entrained 
for Boston. 


222 


PREDESTINED 


In the resounding railway station, Felix said good- 
by to Marie. She had the more easily dissuaded him 
from accompanying her, as he could not find any- 
where funds sufficient for a week’s extravagance. 

Her last embraces had been perfunctory ; her fare- 
well seemed absent-minded. Evidently, her every 
thought reached toward the future. As the train 
rolled forth, she was busy reminding Montmorrissy 
of “her right to the best dressing-room.” 

Felix walked downtown in dejection. 

How empty the city seemed! Seven days of lone- 
liness ! And then ? 

Terror seized him. He was utterly cleaned out, 
heavily in debt, even threatened by his landlord with 
eviction. Now, indeed, Marie seemed on the point 
of slipping from him. Clenching his fists, he re- 
peated, desperately: 

“I must have money! I must have money!” 

That morning he resumed his writing. But so 
pressing was his need, and so great his fear of failure, 
that his labors resulted only in puerilities. He spent 
those days scribbling feverishly, tearing up pages, 
groaning at his impotence. Every hour he wondered 
why Marie had written him but one short note, why 
he could not reach her by the long-distance telephone, 
why the most urgent telegrams failed to elicit a 
response. Perhaps she had broken down from over- 
work! Should he go to her? Or maybe Mont- 
morrissy was slashing the play to pieces, and she was 
too busy to think of him ? He wrote td the manager 
and to Mackeron for news. 


MARIE 


223 


Late on the night before “The Queen of Hearts” 
was expected in New York, the door of the studio 
burst open: Nora Llanelly entered. 

She had come in a cab, bareheaded, wearing 
slippers, with a long blue burnoose thrown over a 
dressing-gown. Her eyelids were swollen ; her nose 
was red; her whole face was blowsy from some 
tempestuous grief. She leaned against the door- 
jamb, dishevelled, wide-eyed, breathless, a large 
apparition at once imposing and alarming. 

Felix’s heart stopped beating. He cried out: 

“What has happened to her!” 

Nora, exposing her full throat, laughed bitterly. 

“To her? Nothing! It’s to me and you that it’s 
happened!” 

He did not understand. Exasperated, she leaned 
forward and shrilled at him, with breaking voice: 

“For God’s sake, get next to yourself! And you 
with a reputation for smartness! Why, I can see it, 
now, from the beginning — every bit, every bit!” 
And sinking into a chair, she informed him that 
Noon, whom she had believed to be in Philadelphia 
on business, was in Boston. The thing was not even 
surreptitious; and Miriam, the hairdresser, to whom 
all scandalous rumors flew like homing pigeons, had 
just decided that it was “a duty” to enlighten Miss 
Llanelly. 

“And some one I’ve known all my life — that I 
done everything for when she was up against it!” 
While fumbling for a handkerchief, the ex-“show 
girl” squeezed her inflamed eyelids together in order 


224 


PREDESTINED 


to keep back the tears. Her face slowly faded from 
Felix’s sight; her voice reached him from afar. 

When he had finally got rid of her, he gazed about 
him in curiosity. He was surprised at the inexpli- 
cable oddity of his surroundings. He peered in a 
mirror, and did not recognize his face. 

Through the night, he suffered very little. His 
brain seemed anaesthetized. 

Toward dawn, the aspect of trivial objects, during 
the night examined many times, began to frighten 
him. He could not bear to look steadily at anything. 
Was he losing his mind ? He drank whiskey, and, at 
last, stumbling off to bed, found relief in stupor. 

At dusk, he awoke. Mechanically he bathed and 
dressed himself; blindly he walked out; and pres- 
ently he found himself at Marie’s door. The mulatto 
maid admitted him, and disappeared. He parted 
the green portieres. 

Shadows veiled walls and ceiling; but from the 
middle of the room, level rays of light reached out 
and dazzled him. She was there, alone, seated be- 
yond the bright centre-table. The lamp of yellow 
porcelain gleamed between them. 

Rising to her feet, she held herself motionless. 
The lamplight illumined her slender figure from the 
hips upward, and the lower part of her face. He 
saw clearly her parted lips. But her eyes, her brow, 
her hair, remained indistinct. 

She wore a new dress of violet-colored silk, the cor- 
sage decked with fringes of jet beads. Behind her, a 
large hat, to match this costume, lay on the top of 


MARIE 


225 


the piano. Over all the furniture were scattered 
garments of white lace, recently unpacked. The 
warm air was redolent of benzoine and “ peau 
c VEspagne .” 

In that familiar atmosphere, evoking with its 
fragrance innumerable memories, there stole into his 
heart a poignant, inappropriate longing. He saw 
her as if after a separation of years ; her every beauty 
was rediscovered; and her attire, strange to him, 
seemed to invest her well-remembered person with 
an additional fascination — with a seductive novelty. 
He had an impulse, almost uncontrollable, to ignore 
the past, if only for a moment. But, perceiving in 
the lobes of her ears two large black pearls, he 
remained as before, while a great lassitude invaded 
his limbs. 

At last, a sob escaped him, and the words: 

“What a wretch you are!” 

In low tones, she retorted: 

“And what about you? What about your deceits 
— your stories of money and prospects ? Ah, but you 
got round me! And, like a fool, I believed every- 
thing about you that Llanelly and others told me. 
Little they knew! But I know now, thanks to him. 
He couldn’t keep it in any longer. And he had the 
right of it. Yes, I find that he was your father’s 
confidential business man. The world’s a small 
place!” 

He stared at her with open mouth, incredulous. 
Harshly, he laughed: 

“That rounder?” 


226 


PREDESTINED 


Then, as her eyes flashed at him through the 
shadows, he realized that there was no possibility of 
further and more shameful weakness on his part. It 
was, indeed, finished. 

An infinite reproach thrilled his utterance : 

“You never loved me!” 

“No, no; don’t go thinking that I have no heart at 
all. I got very fond of you, Felix. This has been 
hard for me. But there are things in the world that 
I’ve never had, that other women have, that I’ve al- 
ways craved, that I must get. And life’s short. And 
I’ve thrown the last fifteen months away. And now I 
must begin again nearly where I was when I met you.” 

Her head sank backward : she seemed to be staring 
fixedly at something above, visible to her alone. The 
darkness had invaded her whole face, which took on 
an unreal, an awesome, look. For Felix, there was 
in her countenance something terrible. The shadows 
round her eye-sockets, her mouth, her cheek-bones, 
were like an insidiously gathering decay. She re- 
sembled Venus in dissolution. 

He found the door. The latch clicked behind him. 
He had fled a tomb. 

Near street lamps, moisture glittered like sus- 
pended folds of gauze. Fog was closing round 
illuminated shop-windows, to blur and enlarge the 
radiance thereof. At a distance, before spaces trem- 
ulously luminous and all reflected in the wet pave- 
ment, pedestrians, indistinct, outlined by yellow 
aureoles, appeared like ghosts floating across deep 
pools of light. 


MARIE 


227 


Felix turned toward the park. 

The trees, in the mist more nebulous than the 
heavens, were gradually pervaded by a threnody of 
falling rain. From the earth rose a continuous sibila- 
tion, and ripplings which suggested mournful voices. 

It was eight o’clock when he emerged from the 
darkness at Columbus Circle. Within the park gates 
stood a small pavilion, open on all sides, furnished 
with benches. Felix, dripping, shivering, worn out, 
entered this shelter and sank into a seat. 

Before him, in the centre of a broad stretch of 
asphalt, loomed the statue of Columbus on its tall, 
granite column. Round this monument, outside a 
ring of green lanterns set out for the regulation of 
traffic, glided an interminable flood of automobiles. 
Beyond, rose a semicircle of buildings gay with 
lights, their roofs crowned with electric signs the 
party-colored globes of which seemed to give off 
fumes into the lurid sky. At the right of this semi- 
circle blazed the facade of the Castle Theatre. 

An illuminated device two stories high, heart- 
shaped, blood-red, proclaimed Montmorrissy’s ex- 
travaganza. Underneath, in a pale sheen blotted 
from time to time by the silhouettes of automobiles, 
surged a confusion of umbrellas, silk hats, and 
women’s cloaks. It was the audience assembling 
for the first-night. 

Gradually the crowd penetrated the theatre. The 
bright vestibule stood empty. A clock dial on the cor- 
ner of Fifty-ninth Street marked half-past eight. She 
was on the stage, singing, smiling across the footlights. 


228 


PREDESTINED 


The young man, his chin sunk forward on his 
breast, turned to retrospection. There came to him 
a remembrance of numberless abasements, losses, 
sacrifices. What anguish had he not suffered ; what 
inestimable treasures had he not thrown away; to 
what straits had he not brought himself! Twisting 
his mouth into a bitter grimace, he pronounced, 
slowly : 

“And all for nothing !” 

It was the epitaph of that period. 


PART THREE 


EMMA 














CHAPTER XI 


His sentimental convalescence was retarded by 
chagrin. It was not easy to recover from the thought 
that he, though all aflame, had never warmed her 
heart. 

He recalled that career of his in gullibility, and 
imagined the ironical applause that must secretly 
have greeted it. He came to hate the scenes of his 
humiliation, each remembrance of which was dis- 
torted by a savage prejudice. 

There took shape before him a nocturnal thorough- 
fare, disguising its shabbiness with a glitter of colored 
lights, where automobiles, bearing women flagrantly 
perilous yet immeasurably ignoble beneath their 
finery, drove decency into the gutters, where the 
pavements disappeared under a surge of neurasthenic 
men penetrating cafes amid the flicker of bold eyes, 
where the apertures of the side streets were filled with 
f shadows of a predacious restlessness, while, beneath 
the aura of the “Tenderloin” — a thin radiance quiv- 
ering as if set in agitation by innumerable spasms of 
sick nerves — was disseminated an atmosphere, which 
all thereabouts were forced to breathe, like some 
vast, enveloping, enigmatically perverse temptation. 

Felix, in revulsion, longed for his old contentment 
in immaculate and simple things, for the tonic reac- 
231 


232 


PREDESTINED 


tions from intentions wholly pure, for such com- 
panionship as should be but a commingling of sub- 
lime tendernesses. And he seemed to see a billowy 
landscape, wooded, immersed in sunshine, swallows 
skimming over lawns at the approach of evening, 
then, emerging from a fading sky, the round, diaph- 
anous moon. 

But in the midst of fine resolutions he realized that 
none of his experiences could be obliterated — that 
thenceforth he would have to go through life, however 
edifying his course, with something of the past dis- 
figuring him. 

Meanwhile, he had yet to make the first retrieving 
step. His pockets were empty; he had pawned all 
his valuable possessions ; there was none left of whom 
he dared ask assistance. His landlord, despairing 
of six months’ back rent, dispossessed him. 

When the hour came for him to leave the studio 
forever, standing beneath the skylight he gazed round 
as if to impress upon his memory each trivial object. 
The worn furniture seemed suddenly replete with 
sentimental value. A flood of reminiscences en- 
gulfed him: he pronounced, slowly and gently, three 
names, “Nina, Eileen, Marie!” They had all 
entered there ; something of their diverse sweetnesses 
remained clinging, as it were, to the hangings like 
faint, mingling perfumes; and all their physical and 
moral variations were confused, at that blending of 
many memories into one memory diffuse and limit- 
less, to him more exquisite, mysterious, and fragrant 
than a garden full of lilies in moonlight. “Good- 


EMMA 


2 33 


by, old room! ,, He felt that he was shutting in 
there something of himself — an essence which would 
mingle forever with an impalpable part of them, that 
they had not been able to take away. “No; what 
the heart gives, it cannot wholly get back. From 
love, no one escapes entire. There is no utter rupt- 
ure, no absolute separation.” He issued into Thirty- 
second Street. Pat, the white bull-terrier, leaped 
and barked to find himself in the open. 

On Washington Square South, Felix found a small 
hotel, square, flat-roofed, built of green brick, six 
stories high, the narrow entrance trimmed with ex- 
ceedingly thin slabs of greenish marble, the office 
furnished with four chairs and two brass cuspidors, 
the elevator somewhat larger than a bird-cage. 
There, on the fifth floor, he obtained, for nine dollars 
a week, a bedroom and a bath, with windows open- 
ing on the square. Beyond a rectilinear expanse of 
trees — their nakedness disclosing asphalt paths, some 
wooden shelters, and a circular fountain — past the 
gray bulk of the Washington Arch — a monument of 
Roman contour, strong and martial — midway of a 
row of three-story brick dwellings with white win- 
dow frames and porticos, appeared the beginning of 
Fifth Avenue: a vista, stretching northward, where 
the prim roofs of conservative gentlefolk soon gave 
place to the “sky-scrapers” of trade, and at the right 
of which, a mile away, above a crenellation of massive 
cornices, was thrust into the air a marble tower. 

From his bedroom window Felix could see the 
site of the Ferrol house, where was rising against 


234 


PREDESTINED 


clouds a black steel framework. In that effacement, 
he took a mournful satisfaction. He was relieved of 
one hitherto persistent, mute reproach. 

Old scenes seemed fated to enclose him. He was 
forced back to The Evening Sphere. 

The vestibule retained its odors of linoleum and 
printer’s ink; the spiral staircase trembled at sub- 
terranean rumblings; one end of the fourth floor 
was foggy with tobacco smoke, where five unwashed 
windows admitted over a swarm of profiles a diluted 
light. An edition of The Evening Sphere was going 
to press. Mechanics, bare-armed, tweaked mats of 
felt from metal slabs; “copy boys” scampered to 
pneumatic tubes ; groups huddled round form-tables ; 
young reporters sat at desks, their foreheads sinking 
toward their speedy pencils. On all sides rose famil- 
iar faces: Johnny Livy'was there, waving a page of 
manuscript and bellowing to be relieved of it. None 
had time to notice Felix. 

But the editor, in his cupboard of an office, his 
coat off, his knees hidden beneath newspapers, care- 
fully laid down his cigar, and went so far as to 
extend a slender hand. In his delicate face a sly 
pleasure seemed to struggle with reserve. He did 
not refrain from asking: 

“The prodigal’s return?” 

“If you’ll have me, sir.” 

The editor seemed on the point of some compli- 
mentary utterance. However, he recovered just in 
time his customary caution. 

“What salary were you getting?” 


EMMA 


235 


“ Twenty-five dollars.” 

“So much? Well — all right. Report to the city 
desk.” 

In a week, it was as if Felix had never left The 
Evening Sphere. He resumed a hundred old habits 
of obedience and work. A sense of retrogression 
wore away ; he discovered many amiable qualities in 
his co-workers, from whom he had once thought 
himself remote in everything. 

He smoked a pipe, drank beer, and often lunched 
with Livy, the reporter, in a cafe on Fulton Street, 
where the bill came to half a dollar. These two found 
themselves much more congenial than formerly. 

The lean, jerky young journalist was at last even 
tempted to confessions. He aspired to be a city 
editor, “his finger marking the pulse-beat of New 
York”; he wanted to marry, to live in a suburban 
cottage, with a baby-carriage on the porch, dogs on 
the step, and chickens in the yard. But many turned 
their eyes toward the city editor’s desk, and Livy had 
few opportunities to meet “nice” girls. However, 
he expounded a theory that one got what he set his 
mind on. There was only one thing to beware of, 
namely, liquor. And, while returning officeward 
with Felix from the cafe, he would point out some 
elderly waif, drifting beneath the bulletin-boards of 
the newspaper offices, gray-headed, ragged, half tipsy, 
who had once been a “star reporter.” Felix felt 
deep in his breast a thrill of fear. 

Innumerable past satiations, remorses, and dis- 
gusts, had united finally to effect in him, as he be- 


PREDESTINED 


236 

lieved, a permanent repugnance, an utter disillusion- 
ment, an epochal upheaval of the conscience. His 
old arguments in favor of self-denial had recurred to 
him. He even thought himself, at last, in sympathy 
with those ascetics whose philosophies had once an- 
noyed him. There emerged from the phantasma- 
goria of history, as if to tempt his emulation, a sort 
of cenobitic pageant of the ages, wherein appeared 
the multitudes of the world’s exalted souls, wherein 
swam together countless faces illumined by renunci- 
ation, wherein myriads of hands fluttered to make 
every manner of devotional sign, while on all sides 
the emblems of abnegatory cults rose and drooped in 
time to an air-shaking diapason of resolute voices. 

Yet Felix soon gazed on this vision, as he had 
gazed on that of the lost pagan frenzies of the flesh, 
in a preoccupation intrinsically all sensuousness. 
He considered less the renouncers of the world than 
what they had renounced ; and the pleasures spurned 
by them were so gilded over with the romance per- 
taining to old things as to bear no visible relation 
to their modern counterparts. Felix, who now ex- 
pressed abhorrence of debauchery in his own place 
and time, dreamed of cities anathematized by antique 
saints, over which Astarte, like the chimera of a 
colossal courtesan — her brow diademmed with stars, 
her pallor looming under veils of smoky indigo that 
filled the night — spread on the evening winds the 
aphrodisiacal perfume of her sigh, to pervade all 
mortals with her madness. In short, Felix would 
have liked just then to be Paphnutius praying in his 


EMMA 


237 


cell, but would have wished to think, while praying, 
of Thais dropping her mantle in the Alexandrian 
theatre. 

So it was with backward looks that the young man 
bade farewell to all his faults. 

But presently, there succeeded his first satisfaction 
feelings of solitude. Tremendous spaces, as in track- 
less seas, encompassed him; doubts obscured, like 
leaden clouds, the horizon where he had thought to 
find his haven: land was not there; he had thrown 
overboard all the palliatives of an earthly voyage; 
and, his brain reeling in a hurricane of longings, he 
anticipated shipwreck for that venture. 

“ Perhaps his sacrifices had been made too vio- 
lently ?” 

At this gust, he capsized. 

With robust and reckless independence, he 
marched into a cafe. Next morning, he was unable 
to appear at the newspaper office. 

Felix then got the idea that by very gradually 
reducing his indulgences he could, without discom- 
fort, bring them to the vanishing-point. This sys- 
tem never seemed so plausible as when, alone in some 
obscure cafe, a long cigar between his teeth, a glass of 
whiskey and soda in his hand, he saw his surroundings 
develop values previously unsuspected. Once more 
life was ephemerally embellished; aspirations came 
thronging, and, at the utter dissolution of the common- 
place, he seemed to glimpse the magnificent, unde- 
cipherable object of all human yearning. Those were 
rare hours, such as he could not frequently afford. 


PREDESTINED 


238 

Little by little, the workaday present obscured the 
romantic past. At length, he found it impossible to 
recall distinctly Marie’s face. He was conscious of 
no more than a fair aureole, indefinitely representing 
perfidy wrapped up in passion, evoking a bitterness 
inextricable from a lurking sweetness. 

Felix was always remembering, however, his in- 
debtedness to Noon, at thought of whom he could 
summon no certain feeling save of humiliation. 

He examined his half-finished novel, begun a year 
before. It dealt with a girl of lowly origin, pursuing, 
through a gloomy region of abysses, the ignis fatuus 
of honest love. Felix destroyed that manuscript. 
“He could have written no more with conviction.” 

But one evening he met on the street Miss Qewan, 
who had been discharged from “The Silly Season” 
by Montmorrissy. Felix’s sympathetic inquiries un- 
locked her lips ; she related her struggles frankly. 

She had left the stage, to try manicuring, hair- 
dressing, peddling sets of books, and office work. 
But the manager of a barber’s shop and a French 
hairdresser had both found her lacking in complai- 
sance; then her book-selling had drawn her into 
equivocal situations, and finally she had engaged to 
work for a promoter of financial schemes “who got 
too gay.” She thought of accepting employment in 
a telephone exchange — a great, bustling place where 
the individual, no doubt, was lost to view. 

“But, my dear girl, such wages!” 

“Yes,” she admitted, “sometimes when I look 
round, I think I’m foolish. The world, as I come 


EMMA 


2 39 

in contact with it, seems to think so, too! But then, 
it’s not just myself.” 

“I know,” said Felix, remembering some tale of 
an eight-year-old sister. 

As she looked up at him, surprised, the bright 
blood flooded her cheeks. 

Formerly pale and slender, she was now well-nigh 
ethereal, and her face, under dark hair arranged in 
unobtrusive folds, revealed a luminosity seen at 
times in countenances of women devoted to religion, 
or to some other elevated, fixed resolve. Felix, 
homeward bound, asked himself : 

“ Suppose it had been one of that sort, instead?” 

A breeze wafted through Washington Square an 
earthy odor that was like a hint of spring. He 
thought of his solitary evenings, and wondered where 
she lived. 

At night, in his hotel bedroom, he scribbled list- 
lessly and tore up synopses of illogical tales. His 
literary failures of the past year had deprived him of 
motive force. It was only when disqualified from 
work by stimulants that he felt able to write master- 
pieces. 

Smoking incessantly, he paced from wall to wall, 
sneered at the dingy room, peered at the clock with- 
out knowing why he wanted time to pass, halted 
before the mantel-shelf, where' stood his mother’s 
photograph. Sometimes he strove, from a sense of 
obligation, to discover a filial tenderness for the 
beautiful young woman, in obsolete attire, whom he 
had never known. 


240 


PREDESTINED 


Lives, pleasures, opportunities, ever touching, pass- 
ing, vanishing away ! But there always remained to 
him the luxury of self-pity. Now and then, when 
Felix was staring at his reflection in the mirror, Pat, 
curled up on a chair, would quickly raise his head. 

The white bull-terrier had grown to weigh forty 
pounds. His lengthy skull tapered to a sharp nose; 
his deep-set eyes, three-cornered and black-rimmed, 
lay slantwise under a flat brow; his trimmed ears, 
lined with pink, stood permanently erect ; he had the 
flexible neck, long, narrow body, slight quarters, and 
sinewy legs of the agile fighting brute. His brass- 
bound collar was dented with many a tooth mark. 

He had spent hours without number listening be- 
hind locked doors for the unique footfall, or enduring 
morosely, in furnace rooms and basement kitchens, 
the guardianship of servants. Felix, a remorseful 
jailer, at least discovered a place where he could 
dine with Pat underneath the table. 

On the north side of Eighth Street, close to Wash- 
ington Square, an old, white dwelling-house had been 
converted into an Italian restaurant, called “ Bene- 
detto’s ,’^ ’ where a table d'hote dinner was served for 
sixty cents. Some brown-stone steps, flanked by a 
pair of iron lanterns, gave entrance to a narrow 
corridor. There, to the right, immediately appeared 
the dining-room, extending through the house — lino- 
leum underfoot, hat-racks and buffets of oak aligned 
against the brownish walls, and, everywhere, little 
tables, each covered with a scanty cloth, set close 
together. 


EMMA 


241 


Felix, at the most inconspicuous table, consumed 
a soup redeemed from tastelessness by grated par- 
mesan, a sliver of fish and four slices of cucumber, 
spaghetti, a chicken leg, two cubic inches of ice- 
cream, a fragment of roquefort cheese, and coffee in 
a small, evidently indestructible cup. Then, through 
tobacco smoke, he watched the patrons round him, 
their feet twisted behind chair-legs, their elbows on 
the table, all arguing with gesticulations. Some- 
times, there floated to him such phrases as: “bad 
color scheme !” “sophomoric treatment !” “miser- 
able drawing!” “no atmosphere!” Benedetto’s was 
a Bohemian resort. 

One night, Felix made the acquaintance there of a 
little man with bright, shallow eyes and eager lips, 
wearing a low collar and a large black bow, who 
introduced himself. 

“My name is Lute. We live in the same hotel, 
and, I understand, pursue the same profession. So, 
naturally, neither of us is to be fettered by absurd 
conventions. May I sit down ? Mercy, what’s this 
— a dog! Will he bite? Good fellow! Guiseppe! 
The regular table d'hote. Mr. Piers, have you read 
'A Sunrise,’ Oliver Corquill’s latest?” 

“Not yet. I must, though, or he’ll be asking me 
if I liked it.” 

Mr. Lute’s eyes opened wide. 

“A friend of Oliver Corquill’s? How interesting!” 
And, hitching his chair forward, he beamed on the 
young man. Felix wondered how he could manage 
to display also his friendship with Paul Pavin. 


242 


PREDESTINED 


“And you, Mr. Piers, may I ask what you are 
publishing just now?” 

“Nothing, at present.” 

The intruder’s face brightened all the more. 

“Same with me. Put out nothing that’s not per- 
fect, eh? I go very carefully. Would you believe 
that in the last three months I’ve released only one 
thing, a quatrain, appearing in the current number 
of The Mauve Monthly , at the bottom of the ninety- 
ninth page?” 

“You are a poet, then?” asked Felix, raising his 
second glass of Scotch and soda. 

“Specifically, but my muse is catholic. I’ve writ- 
ten a novel, that I shall revise to my liking some day. 
I’ve done a play — it was going to be produced last 
year — in collaboration. You must know of Miss 
Nedra Jennings Nuncheon?” 

“I haven’t the pleasure.” 

“You surprise me! A remarkable girl! I must 
introduce you.” 

Next night, Felix was presented to Miss Nuncheon. 

She was tall and thin, with a mop of orange-colored 
hair the ends of which trailed down. In a blue dress 
of many folds, the neck cut low, the sleeves covering 
her knuckles, she seemed to Felix trying to imper- 
sonate some lank damosel in a Preraphaelite paint- 
ing. She spoke impulsively, in the uncertain, reedy 
voice of a person hysterically inclined, and frequently, 
with the vehemence of her nods, shook loose a yellow 
celluloid hairpin. 

It appeared that she wrote short stories about “the 


EMMA 


243 


smart set,” a society existing far off amid the glamour 
of opera-boxes, conservatories full of orchids, yachts 
like ocean steamships, mansions with marble stair- 
ways, Paris dresses by the gross, and hatfuls of dia- 
monds, where the women were always discovered in 
boudoirs with a French maid named Fanchette in 
attendance, receiving bunches of long-stemmed roses 
from potential corespondents, while the men, all 
very tall and dark, possessed of interesting pasts, 
were introduced before fireplaces in sumptuous 
bachelor apartments, the veins knotted on their 
temples, and their strong yet aristocratic fingers 
clutching a photograph or a scented note. Miss 
Nuncheon enjoyed the admiration of a numerous 
class of readers. 

Nevertheless, she lived in a boarding-house near 
Washington Square, where she shared apartments 
with a stout, faded, pretty woman named Mrs. Bab- 
bage, who usually accompanied her to Benedetto’s. 
Mrs. Babbage was interested in occult philosophies, 
and wrote articles for an esoteric magazine. She 
was so calm as to seem almost somnolent; she only 
put on a beatific smile when an Italian waiter spilled 
salad-dressing down her back, and when she lost the 
blue pebble from her cabalistic finger-ring. Accord- 
ing to Mr. Lute, if it were not for Mrs. Babbage’s 
sedative influence, there was no telling what agonies 
Miss Nuncheon might endure on account of her 
intense artistic temperament. 

Felix soon wearied of the “shop talk” that he 
heard at Benedetto’s. There great names were 


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ignored, or else uneasily disparaged, while New York 
authors so obscure as to be unknown to Felix were 
vehemently extolled. Mr. Lute, the symbolic qua- 
train writer, had not heard of the Parnassians; Miss 
Nuncheon, always talking of the “ psychological 
novel,” did not know who Stendhal was; Mrs. Bab- 
bage, who could dash off columns about “the mystic 
ideals of the East,” showed a blank face at references 
to Neoplatonism. Finding his own company less 
exasperating, Felix took to dining late, and, in the 
deserted restaurant, while Pat crunched bones be- 
neath the table, progressed at leisure, without inter- 
ruption, from cheap red wine to high-balls, to liqueur 
brandy, to inspiring dreams. The same swarthy 
waiter always helped him into his overcoat, and, 
from the corridor, called after him: 

“Mind da step, signore!” 

Once, when he had just ordered dinner, he saw, 
at the other end of the room, a pair of eyes, large 
and luminous under arched black brows, staring at 
him. Surely that was the woman who, in search of 
her husband, had interrupted his studio party on 
Christmas eve, a year and more ago ! She bowed to 
him discreetly. 

He rose, and approached her. She bolted a 
mouthful of food, pressed a napkin to her lips, and 
got up from her chair. This movement surprised 
him. He noticed her unfashionable hat, and her 
neat, black dress, which looked home-made. 

“How do you do?” 

“Very well, thanks. And you?” 


EMMA 


245 


“I, too.” 

And they stood gazing at each other without smil- 
ing. 

A small woman, evidently past thirty, she was in 
danger of becoming stout. Her face was fuller than 
when Felix had last seen her, and beneath her soft 
chin had appeared an infinitesimal crease. Her 
skin was a clear white, her hair, blue-black and sim- 
ply dressed ; her blue eyes, extraordinarily lambent — 
which, from a distance, Felix had thought black — 
formed her one beauty. Across her outjutting nose 
ran a slight scar. She had a little, pale, thin-lipped 
mouth disclosing, when she spoke, small, glistening 
teeth. In a soft voice, she said, hesitatingly: 

“How strange to meet you here!” 

“Oh, I find it amusing, sometimes, this sort of 
thing, as I suppose you do. Besides, I live near by.” 

“Why, I thought ” 

“No, up there they began to tear down the build- 
ings round me; it got rather disagreeable, and I left. 
But you?” 

“I live round the corner.” 

“Is it possible! Then you come here often?” 

“For a change. I board. I’m still alone. This 
time, he never came back.” 

After a pause, she added, timidly: 

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. ” 

Felix pronounced his name. She was Mrs. Meers. 

They dined together. 

She had short, plump hands, well kept, which she 
used at table very warily, as if apprehensive of her 


246 


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manners. Indeed, she was obviously ill at ease, 
scarcely touched her dinner, could not be persuaded 
to take champagne, answered in monosyllables, and, 
throughout the meal, seemed in a sort of trance. 
Felix, divining her sensations, exercised his ingenuity 
to impress her further. His vanity was touched, at 
the belief that this little bourgeoise stood in awe of 
him. It was not often, nowadays, that he enjoyed 
the pleasures of superiority. 

When he had paid the bill, he rallied her, gayly: 

“Come, now: what were you thinking of while 
you sat there all through dinner like a little mouse?” 

With head slightly lowered, with lips together, 
she looked at him as if frightened, and, though she 
made no movement, seemed to stir throughout. 

“I was thinking how strange it was to be dining 
here with any one.” Then, by way of explanation: 

“I’m so much alone, you see.” 

It had been drizzling: the pavements, beaded with 
rain, showed, under mistily irradiating street lamps, 
humid footprints. From the juncture of Mac- 
dougal Street and Waverley Place, the trees of Wash- 
ington Square spread out a mass of gray-black 
shadows underlaid with the horizontal, pearly lustre 
of wet asphalt paths. Here and there, a yellow shaft 
of light, enlarged in the damp air, streamed past the 
tree-trunks, and, beyond upper branches, illuminated 
window-panes shone peacefully, their mellow squares 
etched over, as it were, by delicate traceries of twigs. 
Clouds were disintegrating straight overhead. Into 
a radiant space came floating a frail, shining crescent. 


EMMA 


247 


“Oh, the new moon!” cried Felix’s companion, 
with an accent of emotion. “I must make a wish!” 
She stood still, her lustrous eyes upturned, her small 
face solemn from superstition. For the moment, she 
resembled a young girl. 

On Waverley Place, near Sixth Avenue, she halted 
before a house with old window-shutters and a 
brown-stone portico crumbling at the pediment. 
Beside the door, a sign announced “furnished rooms 
and table board.” 

“I live here,” she confessed. 

Felix, homeward bound through Washington 
Square, felt in himself something of the mysterious 
release of nature that was taking place about him. 
“This cool air, moist and sweet, is breathing news 
of spring!” He gazed up at the stars, lips parted, 
in unaccountable expectancy. 

Within the week, curious to know her story—- 
“which might give him some ideas” — he called on 
her. 

In the boarding-house on Waverley Place there was 
no parlor: she had to receive him in her room, up 
two flights of stairs, overlooking the back yards. A 
folding bed, adorned with a blotched mirror, con- 
fronted a white mantel-piece. Some old brocade 
chairs, the relics of more nearly elegant environments, 
exhibited their threadbare arms and split edges. 
Between the windows stood a yellow bureau, bearing 
pin-cushions, brushes, combs, and scissors, laid out 
precisely. The room, despite its shabbiness, was 
neat ; a work-basket on a stand provided a domestic 


248 


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touch; and, when Felix entered, she was preparing 
to hang on the walls a dozen framed photographs 
that she had washed. He suggested helping her; she, 
at such condescension, excitedly refused assistance; 
in his most urbane manner, he insisted. Over this 
mutual labor, they progressed to laughter. He dis- 
covered that she could appreciate his attempts at 
humor. A smile changed her face surprisingly. 

All the photographs were of her. She was por- 
trayed in a lace dress, in a light opera cloak and 
train, in a large hat with plumes, always, in these 
costumes which looked at once expensive and pro- 
vincial, standing stiffly, with immobile face, like a 
wax figure in a show-window. Felix wondered if 
vanity had urged her to this exhibition. He ventured : 

“What pretty dresses! And how well you look in 
them! ,, 

“I used to have things,” she responded, heaving a 
deep sigh. 

Perhaps, then, these were souvenirs by means of 
which she kept active a melancholy retrospection ? 

Lonely, bursting with suppressed complaints, evi- 
dently a woman to make a confidant of the first sym- 
pathetic-looking person, she needed no temptation to 
discuss her history. “I feel everything so deeply! 
And few women have had such troubles as I,” she 
declared, with an air of mournful satisfaction. 

Born and brought up in a Connecticut town, from 
which she had migrated as a bride, she had married, 
for love, the superintendent of a beef-packing house 
in Long Island City. According to her, this husband 


EMMA 


249 


was a fellow inexpressibly handsome and robust, rosy 
from inhabiting cold-storage vaults, resplendent in 
his white apron amid his rows of carcasses, and, no 
doubt, deriving from the exhalations of so much raw 
flesh a brutal lustihood. He had “a good salary”; 
they fitted out a cottage in Long Island City that she 
“would not have exchanged for the best house on 
Fifth Avenue.” There she was happy. 

But “Lew” had taken to drink, had neglected her, 
had proved unfaithful. While referring to her hus- 
band’s many gallantries, she could not help show- 
ing something like admiration. She had possessed, 
or shared, at least, a Don Juan! 

Her parents were dead; her woman friends had 
failed her; men had not been willing to remain dis- 
interested. With nowhere to turn, she had condoned 
her husband’s various offences. She explained, 
“Then, too, Mr. Piers, you don’t know what the 
name ‘wife’ means to a woman.” 

Lew lost his position and could retain no other, 
dissipated his savings and whatever money of his 
wife’s he could secure, sold the cottage, changed 
lodgings every month, haunted race-tracks, dis- 
appeared for weeks on drinking bouts, finally van- 
ished. She was now spending the last of her inheri- 
tance : when that was gone, what should she do ? 

“He may come to his senses yet,” was Felix’s 
suggestion. 

She became greatly agitated. 

“That’s finished! It took me eight years to wean 
myself away from him. But now I hate his very 


250 


PREDESTINED 


name! And I shall never love again — oh, never, 
never again.” 

Felix repressed a smile. She was diverting, this 
little, naive, earnest woman of a class new to him. 
He thought, “I could write a novel round her.” 
Indeed, he fell to contemplating such a book — a 
monotone of misfortunes, beginning obscurely, mov- 
ing through commonplace adventures that his art 
would make prodigious, then slowly drawing to an 
undistinguished, yet exquisitely pathetic, close. So 
he took to calling on her regularly. 

He had his chair, the deepest and most comfortable. 
She bought a metal ash-tray, which she placed near 
him, diffidently; the receptacle first used by him — a 
pasteboard box-lid — was not good enough, it seemed. 

She was long in abandoning her timidity before this 
young man with a distinguished air and a nice com- 
mand of language, this “gentleman,” who gave ex- 
travagant supper-parties in a studio, confessed him- 
self hand in glove with celebrities, and every evening 
might undoubtedly have dazzled the town in the 
most brilliant company. If only she could have 
received him “properly”! She lamented the loss of 
her cottage. What good little dinners she had once 
contrived for persons unworthy of them, the straw- 
berry shortcake a product of her own hands, the table 
laden, thanks to Lew, with the choicest meats and 
game! Her very ingenuousness roused his pity. 

She had spent part of her girlhood in a convent. 
While darning stockings, she related anecdotes: 

“I had a little room with a white bed, and a shiny, 


EMMA 


251 


shiny floor, and one chair. But no mirror! I never 
saw myself! When I got home, I sat all day before a 
mirror, rocking and rocking. 

“In recreation hour, we made clothes for tiny little 
orphans. Sometimes I would be sewing in the grape 
arbor, and a great bunch of grapes would fall right 
into my lap. How my mouth watered! But the 
Sister always said, ‘Be firm, Emma!’ 

“I used to pray at night, ‘If only I could die this 
minute : I’m so good, I would go straight to heaven ! ’ ” 

These speeches, accompanied by shy, bird-like 
poses of the head, all ending in a whisper like a little 
girl’s, bestowed on her a dainty charm, and made 
her seem younger than she was. She confessed to 
twenty-nine years. 

One evening, when he was bidding her good-by, 
their hands grew cold at contact, their glances clung 
together. She, with a look of consternation, slowly 
leaned her weight against the door-jamb. 

At once, he recalled the past, and all its miseries. 
He went downstairs quickly. He swore never to 
enter there again. 

It was spring at last; the windows of his room 
were open; the breeze blew in. And from the dark- 
ness something invisible, impalpable, yet almost per- 
sonal, something soft, languorous, and immense, 
related to the stars, to flowers, to evening winds, 
seemed stealing toward him. 

He was frightened. Recoiling, he whispered: 

“No more! This time, I want to escape!” 


CHAPTER XII 


Felix avoided Benedetto’s restaurant, stopped 
wandering in Washington Square at night, made de- 
tours round Waverley Place, even thought of chang- 
ing his abode. But in a week he asked himself why 
his apprehension had been so intense. He had, it 
seemed, been afraid of an obscure little woman no 
longer youthful, neither pretty nor talented, who 
should have excited in him only pity and amusement ! 
Had he not learned his lesson, through much suffer- 
ing, at the hands of those with whom, in point of 
charms, she was not to be compared? 

Sometimes, however, he imagined her sitting in her 
room, the metal ash-tray empty on her bureau, with 
her dozen photographs, suggestive of “ better days,” 
for company. This picture seemed indirectly to 
reproach him. 

He became angry. Deserted and lonely? So 
were a hundred thousand other women in the city; 
he hoped he was not under obligations to them all! 
“My worst trouble is that I am naturally a senti- 
mental ass!” 

Well, he would make an end of that with his other 
weaknesses. Recalling to mind great historic fig- 
ures, he told himself that those who hardened their 
hearts and rode rough-shod over humanity attained 

252 


EMMA 


253 


the highest eminences. With the intention of emula- 
ting such characters, he assumed an air of energy and 
sternness, was unnaturally curt in all his intercourse, 
and, in the street, regarded passers-by — to their evi- 
dent surprise — with a set, inimical face. In this 
mood, as in all others, he was swept quickly to excess. 

These enforcements of vigor proved only so many 
additional incentives to inebriety. For just as he 
could no longer feel depression without the desire to 
relieve it by familiar means, so he could not experi- 
ence exhilaration without the impulse to appease in 
like manner a nervous appetency that accompanied 
it. His recent ideas of abstinence faded in a moral 
obscuration continually renewed. Nearly every night 
he reached his bed half stupefied by his potations. 
At the newspaper office, he welcomed eagerly an 
“ outdoor job,” as promising the opportunity to 
snatch some highballs on the way. 

Now and then, when Felix, at a battered desk, was 
scribbling of defaulters, homicides, and politicians, 
the editor, on the threshold of his compartment, a 
newspaper clipping in his hand, gazed at the young 
man as if absent-mindedly. If he had in prospect a 
delicate commission, which threatened libel suits, he 
beckoned Johnny Livy. 

This reporter managed to get himself affianced to a 
modest girl who lived with her parents in a suburb. 
Immediately, he left off drinking, discarded his black 
felt hat and corncob pipe, strove to be at once better 
dressed and more economical, worked desperately to 
attract the favorable notice of his superiors, had no 


254 


PREDESTINED 


small talk that was not about “the cost of living.” 
Felix, his frequent confidant, disguised commiserat- 
ing smiles, like one who sees others striving for such 
fruits as have withered at his touch. 

But one brilliant afternoon in May, when all the 
trees of Washington Square were stippled with a 
tender green, there came to him a sadness not to be 
dispelled by sunshine; and he paused, in the door- 
way of his hotel, to look again at a young couple 
promenading, slowly and silently, beside the red and 
yellow tulip beds, beneath the budding leaves, to the 
twittering of mating birds. 

When he went upstairs, he found on the door-sill 
of his room an envelope addressed in an unknown, 
childish hand. It was from Emma Meers. 

She had been wondering how she could have 
offended him. The thought of losing, by some inad- 
vertence, a kind friend — if she might call him so — 
with friends so scarce, had nearly “brought her down 
ill.” “Your calls were something to look foreward 
to; they made me feel like I wasent all together 
alone. I know it was a great kindness of you to 
bother with me, being so busy, and haveing so inter- 
esting people to take up your leisure, but if you could 
find it conveniant only to drop in sometimes when 
you are not engaged, and cheer me up like you used, 
is the wish of yours very gratefully” . . . 

Poor little woman, this letter, with all its errors so 
painstakingly engrossed, had been a troublesome task 
for her! Her face, timid and beseeching, appeared 
before him no less clearly than on those evenings 


EMMA 


255 


when they had forgotten in company their loneliness. 
He wondered how he could have been apprehensive 
of a personality so submissive, so helpless, so easy — 
if the utmost befell — to leave behind. 

For was there not to be read, between the lines of 
that laborious script, a meaning more wistful than 
she dared express; did he not perceive, with an 
intuition sharpened to discern every sentimental ap- 
proach, that something was seeking him which he 
had never yet been able to withstand? He gazed, 
in fact, toward a new horizon, where hovered the 
promise of a passion the more piquant for its humble 
and almost domestic setting. At the revival of his 
ineradicable curiosity, all his determinations were 
forgotten. 

He returned to Waverley Place. 

She rose from a chair; her hand flew to her breast ; 
she stood motionless, staring at him. 

“Oh, how you frightened me!” 

“I wasn’t expected?” 

“No. Yes. That is, I hardly hoped. So you got 
my poor letter?” 

“A charming letter.” 

“Ah, you say that!” 

She was within his reach, her small, upturned face 
assuredly betraying the secret he had exp|cted to 
discover. But suddenly, remembering their short 
acquaintance, he became incredulous. What if he 
were on the verge of a humiliating mistake? He 
hesitated, lost his chance, and sat down in “his 
chair.” She placed the metal ash-tray at his elbow. 


256 


PREDESTINED 


“And what have you been doing, all these three 
weeks?” 

“Working every minute. And you?” 

“Trying to forget my troubles.” 

So they began again. After all his anticipations, 
such an anticlimax! 

Yet whose fault was it, if not his? That evening, 
while returning home, he denounced his vacillation; 
he vowed that their next meeting should be different. 
As always, when once tempted to tamper with his 
resolutions, he was to be satisfied with nothing less 
than the annihilation of them. 

Such dexterity in love-making as he now possessed 
was not needed in the slightest. His first change of 
voice from commonplace to tender agitated her; at 
his near approach she fixed him with a dewy gaze 
through which her soul seemed to flow toward him; 
at his touch, she closed her eyes, swayed forward, 
inarticulate, and fell into his arms. 

He was less elated than vexed ; by this point-blank 
surrender he had been cheated of innumerable tenu- 
ous pleasures such as, in his opinion, should have 
composed their amorous progress. Clumsy haste! 
His aesthetic sense was outraged, and, in his heart of 
hearts, he blamed her for his disappointment. 

Nevertheless, he could not help being flattered by 
the confession she gasped out while clinging to him 
with averted face. She had intended never to love 
any one again; she had not believed it possible for 
her to do so; yet from that first night in Benedetto’s 
she had suspected that it was “all up with her.” 


EMMA 


257 


“But I fought against it! I never meant to love you, 
either! Oh, why, why, did you make me? Why did 
you come back ? Something terrible will happen to 
us — a judgment from Heaven! Don’t try to com- 
fort me; I know it, I know it! Oh, if the Sisters in 
the convent heard; if my mother could look down!” 
She sobbed violently, struggled to escape his arms, 
collapsed in a sort of swoon, her head thrown back, 
her large eyes glassy and motionless in their sockets. 
Presently, from her pallor and immobility, one might 
have believed her dead, save that tears continually 
welled up in the outer corners of her eyes, and, un- 
expectedly, ran down her cheeks. “This woman 
frightens me,” thought Felix. Her outburst took on 
for him an ominous aspect: without knowing what 
he feared, he wished himself far away. When he 
strove to withdraw his hand from hers, she held him 
fast with unexpected alacrity. He remained still, an 
uncomfortable prisoner. 

Thus, as if with subtle portents, their intimacy was 
inaugurated. 

It soon became necessary for him to visit her every 
evening, if he was to escape lugubrious sighs, pathetic 
references to “lonely hours,” such parade of melan- 
choly looks as would have been an appropriate re- 
proach for a desertion covering a period of years. 

She had not been long in rallying from her first 
remorse, in denying her scruples, in discovering ex- 
cuses for her weakness. “Lew had abandoned her, 
so she was no longer under obligations to him; as 
that life was finished, she had the right to begin 


PREDESTINED 


258 

another. Who knew but that Felix’s coming had 
been intended as a recompense for so much unhap- 
piness?” 

Her idea, unconsciously disclosed, that relations of 
a permanent nature were commencing, caused Felix 
to open wide his eyes. The devil! Here was a 
woman who made up for lack of other qualities with 
a fine abundance of impetuosity! “I see that I must 
think well of Lew, for I suspect him to be the chap 
who is going to save me some day from a warm situ- 
ation!” Indeed, it occurred to Felix that the wisest 
plan would be to disappear at once. But there was 
a charm in Emma Meers’s society that he could not 
deny. 

She showed him nothing but gratitude, naive ad- 
miration, and humility. Such behavior gave him an 
excellent opinion of himself, and caused him to 
assume toward her a manner affectionately con- 
descending. 

On summer nights, in her darkened room — when 
the warm breeze, swelling the window-curtains of 
white scrim, brought across the back yards sounds of 
piano-playing, of voices warbling scales, of cats in 
combat — Felix, “worn out by a hard day’s work,” 
reclined in his chair, while Emma knelt beside him 
in a pose that she protested was quite comfortable. 
A faint light, from other back windows, penetrated 
the curtains; her face, pale and indistinct, showed a 
beauty so ambiguous as to make him wonder whether 
it was she indeed, or some amorous incarnation from 
his dreams. Then her shadowy eyes, full of solem- 


EMMA 


^59 

nity, approached; he felt her breath on his lips; he 
recognized her. 

In intimacy, he soon lost his earliest impression of 
her looks — just as, by seeing any object every day, we 
come to forget our first appraisal of it. She seemed 
younger to him than formerly. Perhaps that was 
owing to her manner of a little girl, habitual in 
moments of tenderness? 

“Make love to her,” she would whisper, childishly. 

Caresses sometimes recalled to her other scenes: 
in the hushed voice that sentimentalists reserve for 
tales of old romances the charm of which survives all 
disillusion, she spoke of her honeymoon, of her early 
married life, of her cottage, where so much sweetness 
was once imprisoned. That had been a home! 
Suffering from the suppression of her strong domestic 
instinct, she longed for a field, however narrow, where 
she might play the housewife. 

Then, unable to deny herself the pleasures of mel- 
ancholy, she dwelt on her misfortunes. An almost 
chronic emotionalism caused her to dilate and con- 
fuse all stories of past happenings and sensations, so 
that overstatements of Lew’s cruelty got mixed up 
with extravagant reports concerning his good looks 
and dissolute accomplishments. Felix made a gest- 
ure of annoyance. 

“You’re fond of him yet, I think!” 

“Never! Never! Would I be in love with you ?” 

After a silence, she mused: 

“But I’ll tell you this, that since him I’ve never 
met any one but you that I could love.” 


26 o 


PREDESTINED 


Had she, then, been looking round for some one? 
If Felix had not come along, would she not, finding 
isolation of the heart intolerable, have succumbed to 
another? The young man was not much flattered 
by this idea. From that night, he exerted himself to 
convince her that his merits were supereminent ; and, 
on account of the earnestness with which he entered 
upon this task, he began to lose his pose of superiority. 

Reflecting that he could hardly be damaged, now, 
by any indiscretion, he frequently appeared with her 
in public. The most frugal excursions seemed to 
delight her. 

They rode by trolley-car to Coney Island, where, 
in pleasure-grounds full of grotesque buildings made 
of staff and tinsel, with rococo bridges arching across 
lagoons and minarets rising on all sides, they sat at 
table on a balcony above the crowds, Felix drink- 
ing highballs, and Emma, in a broad-brimmed sailor 
hat and a white linen dress too tight for her, laugh- 
ing at the merrymakers below. She was quick to ap- 
preciate humorous incidents, and occasionally aston- 
ished Felix with a flash of wit. 

“Yes,” she cooed, in a tone of infantile compla- 
cency, “sometimes she can say funny things. But 
not often when you’re round.” 

“Why not?” 

Emma shook her head, mysteriously. 

“’Cause she’s afraid.” 

At dusk, when electric lamps outlining the fan- 
tastic edifices all glowed forth, they set out through 
the crowd toward an open-air restaurant near by, 


EMMA 


261 


where a band of Tyrolese sang under trees festooned 
with yellow lanterns. 

On the way, the spectacle of countless faces stream- 
ing past him gradually bewildered Felix. His eye- 
lids drooped; he caught his toe in something. She 
tightened her grasp on his arm. 

“I beg your pardon! Do you know, I was just 
wondering what would happen if we met your Lew ?” 

She compressed her lips; her eyes flashed fire; 
abruptly, she looked her age. In a high, metallic 
voice, she replied: 

“Fd soon settle him! Fd say, ‘Why, what have 
you to do with me ? I was divorced from you months 
ago in South Dakota, and this is my husband now!”’ 

While he considered this reply an amusing one, 
Felix could not help wishing that another had 
occurred to her. 

At dinner, he became more intoxicated. Lanterns 
among the trees, each lending to an enveloping mass 
of leaves a hue violently green, appeared to him like 
fruits in an enchanted garden; the voices of the 
Tyrolese women, wafted from a distance, barely sur- 
viving the continuous rattle of dishes, were like the 
staccato cries of sirens rising above the plashing of 
a surf; while Emma’s face, at once mature and 
girlish, expectant and demure, slowly turned beau- 
tiful before him. He leaned forward, his temples 
throbbing, some wild, lover’s eloquence rising to his 
lips. But a phrase in the Tyrolese women’s song 
reminded him of “The Lost Venus,” and, as he 
looked away, he saw a profile that brought his 


262 


PREDESTINED 


heart into his mouth. Great heavens, how like Nina 
Ferrol! 

“ Felix, what is the matter?” 

He turned his eyes toward Emma. 

“ Nothing. But we’ll go home, if you don’t mind. 
My dog’s back there, shut up in a room, alone. The 
poor brute, I’ve had him since he was a puppy, and 
this is the way I treat him.” 

And, as they rode cityward, he thought: 

“If only I could begin my life all over!” 

But one night he took Emma to a theatre, where 
they watched just such a review as Montmorrissy 
habitually produced. The lively music, the brilliant 
stage thronged with smiling girls audaciously attired, 
the atmosphere of reckless gayety that floated out 
across the footlights, affected Felix with a species of 
nostalgia. He recalled many hours that had been 
fraught with pain, but in which he now discovered 
the charm that frequently enriches the most unhappy 
episodes, at retrospection. No, he would not have 
omitted that portion of his life! 

In the crowded lobby of the theatre, Felix came 
face to face with Oliver Corquill. The young man 
had an impulse to draw back : he owed this celebrity 
two hundred dollars. 

But the latter, advancing with a smile, grasped 
Felix by the hand. 

“What an elusive fellow you are! I called at your 
old rooms, to find you vanished.” 

“I meant to send you word. Don’t think I’d for- 
gotten you.” 


EMMA 


263 

And, uncomfortably conscious of Emma’s home- 
made hat, he introduced the novelist. She received, 
along with a courtly bow, one of those looks that 
seem no more than amiable, but which, while cover- 
ing in a flash the entire person, plunge, as it were, 
into the heart. Emma promptly conceived an antip- 
athy against Corquill, and could not help complain- 
ing of him to Felix before they reached Waverley 
Place. Excitedly, she burst forth: 

“I mistrust him! Besides, he doesn’t like me. 
Oh, I could see it, in spite of his smiles! He’ll call 
on you, now, and talk to you about me. Yes, he’ll 
show you all my faults; he’ll persuade you to leave 
me!” 

“What rot!” ejaculated Felix, with the first accent 
of irritation that she had heard from him. 

Stopping short beside a lamp-post, she stared at 
him with eyes dilated, as much aghast as if he had 
struck her. And, to his consternation, her lament 
rang through the silent street: 

“You see! You’re changed already! Oh, I knew 
it! I felt it!” 

It took him half an hour to make her “listen to 
reason.” 

However, as she had predicted, Oliver Corquill 
lost no time in calling at Felix’s hotel. 

In his gray flannel suit and dove-colored cravat 
pierced with a coral pin, he still suggested the busi- 
ness office far more than the study.. Apparently 
without even glancing round the hotel bedroom, he 
made himself at home, and spoke of Paul Pavin. 


264 


PREDESTINED 


The Frenchman had been in Corfu painting a por- 
trait of the German emperor’s daughter; thence he 
had gone for a jaunt among Scandinavian fjords; he 
might come to New York within the year, but mean- 
while wished especially to be remembered to Felix. 

The young man was moved by the persistent 
friendliness of so fine a personage. Corquill con- 
tinued: 

“Yes, I’m sure he feels a sincere regard for you. 
But then, beneath all his irreverence, he has a heart 
of gold. Also, a past eventful enough to make his 
advice worth taking.” 

Felix was blushing. He blurted out: 

“Why not say at once that I’d better profit by it?” 

“Well, I know how much more profitable than 
good advice experience is. All the same, if you’ll 
pardon me, one oughtn’t to need an annual repetition 
of experience. To be frank, while I was glad to hear 
that ‘The Queen of Hearts’ had gone on the road, 
I was as sorry as if it hadn’t, when I met you in the 
theatre the other night.” 

Felix, his lips trembling from indignation, stam- 
mered : 

“A rather hasty deduction!” 

The novelist, with a gentle smile, shook his head. 

“You’d be surprised how many people of all sorts 
I know, how much I hear, how frequently insignifi- 
cant episodes have unseen witnesses, how often a 
man believes that he lives in secret when his whole 
activity is talked about.” 

Felix was dumbfounded. At last: 


EMMA 265 

“If I may be so personal, in my turn, what busi- 
ness is this of yours?” 

Mr. Corquill was not at all embarrassed. 

“ My dear boy, I have as much solicitude for talents 
as you have, probably, for human life. If you saw a 
foolish fellow putting a rope round his neck, what 
would you do?” 

The other stared before him. 

“I think I’d wish him good luck.” 

The novelist stood up. 

“Dine with me to-night.” 

“I — I have an engagement.” 

“We’ll break it,” Corquill announced, and 
marched Felix off to the restaurant of a quiet hotel 
on Fifth Avenue. 

They seated themselves by an open window in a 
spacious room panelled with mahogany grown dull 
from age, where the brass chandeliers were old- 
fashioned, the thick Turkish carpet faded, the buf- 
fets antiquated, the grey-headed waiters of that 
placid and paternal mien which results from long 
service in an environment sedately rich. Few per- 
sons were dining there: some elderly gentlemen, 
their hair neatly parted down the back, sat erect at 
small tables; in a corner was to be seen a family 
party — the father, the mother, and three little girls 
in white eating ices with the lax, contented looks of 
well-bred children. Felix gazed round him with a 
sensation of shame. Memories of his own childhood 
came to him, and, sick at heart, he inquired of his 
companion : 


266 


PREDESTINED 


“Why did you choose this place ?” 

“On a hot night, I like quiet and elbow-room,” 
was the innocent response. 

The novelist, who had never before seemed capa- 
ble of boastfulness, talked of his past successes, the 
royalties earned from his books, an estate that he 
had just bought in the country, his dogs, his roses, 
and his polo-ponies. Felix commented, bitterly: 

“Yes, you are to be envied.” 

The celebrity shrugged his shoulders. 

“Oh, when I was your age, I couldn’t write such 
good stuff as you’ve turned out.” 

In Corquill’s opinion, to attain success one had to 
expend his entire force in pursuit of the desired 
object. Only disaster was foreshadowed by Felix’s 
belief that one should experience all he intended to 
portray. The artist, to describe destruction, did not 
need to destroy himself. He was informed with an 
intuitive comprehension of life, developing, as Felix 
would find out, more fully year by year. As the 
paleontologist reconstructed from one fossil bone the 
whole skeleton of a prehistoric animal, so the adept 
in literature, prepared by long and intense scrutiny 
of human hearts, found in a phrase caught at ran- 
dom, in a look surprised on a strange face, the clue 
to a character, to a life. In fine, the great novel 
resulted from perception, intuition, and logic. And 
Corquill cited a quotation, to the effect that Balzac — 
who had avoided nearly every material diversion in 
order that his mentality might be the clearer — de- 
picted his characters so marvellously as to make one 


EMMA 


267 

think he must have been, at some time, a janitor, a 
spinster, a swashbuckler, a demirep, a priest. Even 
in his youth, that speech of Strindberg’s could never 
have been applied to him: he had never been the 
artist “ yearning for the pinnacle of ambition, with- 
out being willing to pay the price required of those 
who are to reach it.” 

Felix, to whom the last theory always seemed the 
most admirable, was greatly impressed. 

That night, the young man assured himself that a 
new life should begin for him at once. He had never 
so clearly perceived his folly. He marvelled at the 
stupidity which had brought him to such a pass. He 
would escape all his detriments, Emma included. 

This last project, however, required thought. 

Meanwhile, for three days he drank nothing, and, 
since this mood demanded of him, as usual, the 
strictest behavior that could be imagined, did not 
smoke so much as a cigarette. 

Then, his pleased amazement — that such continence 
had been latent, all the while, in him — gave place to 
depression. He fell to gazing dismally at strangers 
wreathed in tobacco smoke, and at jolly fellows, 
glimpsed through the doorways of cafes, pouring 
whiskey down their throats with gusto. He consid- 
ered that he suffered much more from strict behavior 
than from reckless. 

Thereupon, without any sense of repetition, he 
began an old farce. 

He decided that he had been wheedled into a state 
no less absurd than dolorous. Why should he tor- 


268 


PREDESTINED 


ment himself by renouncing pleasures that the world 
enjoyed? Besides, CorquilPs homilies would have 
been more suitably lavished on a middle-aged man 
who had frittered away his life. Felix, for his part, 
was still young enough to feel that he had eternity 
at his disposal. His exalted determinations in re- 
spect of work went by the board ; he had no thought 
for anything save his immediate desires. 

But no sooner had he broken his every resolution, 
than, with satiety, his scruples all returned. Cor- 
quilPs reproofs again seemed portentous. Fear of 
the future once more assailed the young man, who 
remembered suddenly that this was not the first time 
he had failed in such a struggle. 

And there began for him a period of alternating 
renunciations and relapses. His solitary hours were 
passed in such shamefaced vacillation as precedes 
the final weakness, or in such gloomy self-reproach 
as follows it. So many discomfitures ended by crip- 
pling his self-confidence: he came to make fresh 
resolutions mechanically, without conviction; his 
struggles grew weaker, and, finally, ended. All his 
old habits were again in daily practice. 

He tried to excuse his frailty by argument. Was 
the world fashioned for the avowal of life, or the 
denial of it? Were not morality and right conduct 
dependent solely on contemporary opinion? Who 
knew but that asceticism was not more abnormal 
than licentiousness? If continence reacted on the 
modern conscience in the form of a spiritual reward, 
suppose there had been no inheritance of a modern 


EMMA 


269 

conscience? The pagans, expansive, appetent, un- 
moral, happy in their pursuit of every earthly pleas- 
ure, lucky in their ignorance of Christianity and its 
renunciations, gained, perhaps, a satisfaction far 
more intense than did the saints ? Ah, to plunge into 
pagan ecstasies, unhampered by the heavy chains of 
Christian remorse! But, alas, such possibilities had 
been done for almost with the hamadryads; the set- 
ting of purple and azure undulations was obliterated ; 
the very air of the earth was changed in savor since 
young men in hyacinth and gold had ceased wander- 
ing, at nightfall, free from all disabling compunction, 
toward the Bacchic rendezvous, or the grove of 
Venus Callipyge. The drab present, aswarm with 
elongated, hypocritical faces, blotted out the sheen 
of a remote age, sensual and care-free. 

So Felix, full of classic cravings, had to content 
himself with Washington Square, Coney Island, and 
the table d'hote at Benedetto’s. 

On nights of intense heat, resonant in that neigh- 
borhood with an ignoble clatter, when, in the Italian 
restaurant, the whirling wooden fans seemed to churn 
to a more stifling consistency the vitiated air, he still 
heard, occasionally, through a meal of wilted, stale, 
and melting food, the literary aphorisms of Mr. Lute, 
Miss Nuncheon, and Mrs. Babbage. Their constant 
avidity for “shop talk,” their excitement in trivial 
debate, their relish for revealing superficial knowl- 
edge, all that exuberance which has been entitled 
“the enthusiasm of the artistic parvenu ,” caused 
Felix to curse the luck which made it necessary for 


2J0 


PREDESTINED 


him to listen to “such trash.” From sheer spite, 
masking his sneers with the benignity of an attending 
physician, he prescribed for Mr. Lute the “History 
of Criticism,” by Saintsbury, for Miss Nuncheon 
some fifteen volumes of essays by Sainte-Beuve, for 
Mrs. Babbage all the works of Kant and Spinoza. 
Truth is, besides indulging in covert ironies, he made 
the mistake of exhibiting his information and talents ; 
and no doubt his acquaintances, like humble travel- 
lers at an inn who find themselves dining with a 
stranger rigged out in jewels and fine clothes, would 
soon have preferred, for their greater self-satisfaction, 
a separate room. 

But Mrs. Babbage was producing esoteric pam- 
phlets that sold everywhere for a half dollar a copy; 
Miss Nuncheon had got a publisher for a book of 
her short stories about “the smart set” ; Mr. Lute had 
joined the staff of The Mauve Monthly , and from the 
office of that magazine he sent Felix a patronizing 
letter asking for “a glance at some of his latest 
efforts.” What mortification! While those three 
were guarding bravely and letting shine their little 
flames, he, burning with great visions, suffered at 
the mere sight of his writing-table an extinguishment 
of all his fire ! 

His melancholy, his savage pessimism, his in- 
creasing irritability, bewildered Emma. Finally, 
she convinced herself that he had met “some one 
else.” 

Her fits of despair came on whenever he kissed 
her carelessly, avoided a caress, or remained pre- 


EMMA 


271 


occupied at her plea, always uttered in the same 
childish tones, “Now he must make love to her.” 

“Yes, yes, it’s true: his kisses aren’t the same; 
his thoughts are always wandering ; he is often cross 
with me, now! Ah, I knew this would happen — I 
was too happy ; it’s my punishment ! There’s some 
other woman, some silly little thing, some actress — 
that’s it, some old friend! Oh, didn’t I see them 
that night, in his studio, through the crack of the 
door — a lot of gay, cruel-hearted, mercenary creat- 
ures? But could they love him as I do? Never! 
Never! No one could ever love him like me!” She 
became limp in her chair ; her blue-black hair, pressed 
out against the cushion, accentuated her pallor; her 
white throat shook with sobs; and, her pupils dis- 
appearing beneath her heavy eyelids, she seemed to 
be fainting. At such moments, her condition was apt 
to frighten him. He seized her cold hands, called 
her name, ran for a glass of water or a flask of 
cologne. 

“Emma! Speak to me!” 

At length, her pupils still invisible, she whispered: 

“My heart! I feel as if it was going to burst.” 
And, in a thin wail : 

“Who would care?” 

Pity seized him : he cast himself down beside her 
chair, put his arms round her, mingled with reassur- 
ing words a hundred kisses of a convincing warmth. 
Under this treatment, she revived, clung to him 
weakly, between long, quivering sighs made demands 
that stirred his memory. 


272 


PREDESTINED 


“ Swear that you love me, and no one else!” 

He vowed eloquently that she was all the world 
to him. 

But for Felix the novelty of that attachment was al- 
ready gone: he had found, beneath Emma’s innumer- 
able caresses, protestations, and excesses of emotion, 
the monotony of a passion long since thoroughly 
explored, lacking, this time, the ornament that wealth 
and beauty, beauty and notoriety, had lent it for- 
merly. Still, from timorousness, from want of in- 
genuity, from lassitude of will, he continued with 
her, in the midst of his most ardent avowals thinking : 

“What a fool I was! Now how shall I get rid of 
her?” 


CHAPTER XIII 


On a night of early autumn, Felix received a letter 
and a package, postmarked in Paris, from Pavin. 
The letter announced that the portrait-painter was 
going to spend another winter in New York. The 
package contained an old volume of French prose — 
the third and last work of Pierre Buron, once Paving 
friend, and Mme. Lodbrok’s husband. 

Seating himself by his writing-table for the evening, 
Felix began to read this book. 

Passages at once exact and gorgeous, like clusters 
of strange gems reflecting multi-colored rays, filled 
the young man with wonder. Very soon he knew 
that he had in hand one of those masterpieces which 
can only be “a communion of thought between a 
magical writer and an ideal reader,” since the author, 
by ignoring the predilections of the many, by regard- 
ing solely the sensitiveness of the few, has made to 
pride the sacrifice of contemporary fame. 

One was borne away to regions obscured as if by 
a perpetual twilight, where men and women, ren- 
dered well-nigh indistinguishable by the subtlety of 
their emotions, appeared to move through ancient 
groves aglimmer with decaying shrines, monuments 
to obsolete ardors. These wanderers, wraithlike in 
the constant dusk, seemed ever to gaze round them 
273 


274 


PREDESTINED 


with the uncertain gestures of the lost, to pause by 
crumbling columns, to heave a sigh at finding only 
ruins, to utter tentatively the first measures of a song 
composed for an archaic use, to droop on hearing 
that melody die away without an echo, while setting 
forth again, to chance, perhaps, on relics underfoot: 
broken sword-blades, little shattered idols, corroded 
diadems, rotted treasure, all burdens cast aside, in 
other ages, by weary predecessors. The whole work, 
indeed, typified a labyrinth, where solitary figures 
moved in and out, tossed up their arms, and sobbed, 
“I have not found it!” The last page left this im- 
pression of unsatisfied desire intact ; and the thought 
remained that through an eternity the same gloom 
would cover the same intricacies, while the same 
phantoms stumbled on in the same vain search. 

It was as if Felix were gazing on a landscape never 
previously seen in life, with that thought, which 
makes the scalp tingle, “Have I not always dwelt 
here?” It seemed to him that his soul for the first 
time mingled with another, the soul of an unknown, 
to whom he could have cried, “Surely, in some world 
you and I have been as one!” 

He fell to thinking about Pierre Buron. Did he, 
like those spectral creatures of his brain, still move 
through shadows, or had he given up his quest ? 

Well to have lost one’s self in such a labyrinth, if 
one could leave on its outskirts so beautiful a relic! 
And Felix was chilled with fear, at the thought that 
he, when ultimately vanishing, might leave behind 
him nothing half so precious. 


EMMA 


275 


He sprang up, and approached the window. 
Already the mature foliage of Washington Square 
was covered with a bluish light. 

How quickly the days succeeded one another, 
and melted into years! He was twenty-nine. Who 
could foretell the duration of this gift of life ? 

To die in an hour, to be obliterated, never to be 
recalled, to have lived in vain ! 

Cool breezes, bearing from afar a simple frag- 
rance, set to vibrating gently in his heart chords 
long untouched. Then the dawn, like a golden fluid, 
descended upon distant towers; and, as the city thrust 
its innumerable transfigured roofs out of the shad- 
ows, there seemed to unroll “the kingdoms of the 
world, and all the glory of them.” Should he not 
wring therefrom all that he had missed ? Looking up 
at the vivid sky, entranced by that spreading symbol 
of renewal, he felt in himself the strength, the purity, 
the splendor, of a new day. From before him the 
vapors of irresolution shredded quite away, so that 
he discerned once more, in an immaculate zenith, 
the radiant pattern of a great life, promising immortal 
consequences. 

That day, he plunged again into work. Every 
evening, as soon as he could escape from Emma, he 
hurried home, cleared his writing-table, strove to 
reduce to black and white the thoughts with which 
he hoped to earn quickly an enduring fame. 

But these thoughts proved to be too large for 
expression by such terms as he could master. The 
moment he set pen to paper, he experienced the con- 


PREDESTINED 


276 

fusion, the impotence, the despair, of those who 
dream that splendid edifices can be constructed with 
a few unseasoned tools. 

He recalled the first homily he had ever heard from 
Corquill, about the preparation of the prospective 
author. He returned to the study of the technique 
of writing. 

Then he favored successively a score of masters, 
pursued each theory of exposition a little way, imi- 
tated and abandoned every mannerism ; in his anxiety 
to employ all artifices at once, accomplished nothing. 
In literature, just as in life, he was seduced by every 
whisper into excursions far afield, till, lost amid 
strange scenes, in a daze he halted, dejectedly to 
retrace his steps. At last, glimpsing on all sides 
vistas that he would have needed a dozen lifetimes 
to explore thoroughly, he understood the magnitude 
of his enterprise. For him, there could be no sudden 
composition of masterpieces; the waiting would be 
tedious and fraught with travail ; only a whole exist- 
ence devoted to labor could bring him such honors 
as he had in mind. 

Nevertheless, he determined to press on; for he 
felt that he was made for this attempt or none; and 
at the thought of turning to some other career, he be- 
came dizzy, as if on the point of slipping into a void. 

“Is it not curious,” he reflected, “that I alone, of a 
family for generations notoriously unimaginative, 
should feel this impulse?” Inspecting his mother’s 
photograph, he wondered whether that young face, 
beautiful, and strange with smothered fire, contained 


EMMA 


277 


the answer to his question. “Yes,” he concluded, 
“ no doubt I owe my sensibilities to her.” He poured 
out a drink of whiskey, lighted his pipe, and set to 
work again. 

The clock ticked off the hours; the pen scratched 
over the paper; Pat, stretched on the bed-quilt, 
woke from time to time, feebly wagged his tail, and 
went to sleep again. Silence crept upon the city. 
A bell, far off, struck two. Felix rose, and Pat 
scrambled briskly from the bed. The dog knew well 
what movement of his master’s presaged their nightly 
promenade together. 

They traversed empty thoroughfares, where 
shadows on either side projected masses apparently 
material, where converging rows of lights gave off 
scintillations like small, white-hot ingots, where, 
midway of each perspective, the sky let down into 
the street its veils of solemn blue. Felix found the 
side door of a cafe ajar. The bartender, who was 
putting on his hat, consented to remain till his cus- 
tomer had gulped down some highballs. 

They turned homeward, the dog pattering ahead, 
the young man loitering to enjoy his exaltation. 
While passing the blank front of Benedetto’s res- 
taurant, he smiled pityingly at thought of Miss 
Nuncheon, Mr. Lute, and Mrs. Babbage. While 
pausing to look down Waverley Place, he shrugged 
his shoulders at recollection of Emma. Nowadays, 
with her most passionate speeches ringing in his ears, 
he was like a man listening to a hard-working but 
inferior actress in a play heard too often. 


PREDESTINED 


278 

But Emma, like the tobacco he smoked to excess 
without awaiting any craving for it, like the liquor 
he continued to drink just because it remained at 
hand, had become for him a habit. Well, presently 
he would leave her, too, behind! 

There was still some whiskey in the decanter on his 
mantel-shelf. He finished it, and went to bed. 

In the morning, no matter how great his lethargy, 
he had to rush downtown to The Sphere building. 

On rising, he “ pulled himself together” with a 
cocktail, which was brought to his room on a tray, 
by a bell-boy with dirty thumbs. On descending 
from the elevated railway station at Chambers 
Street, he took another drink in a saloon. This 
stimulus was usually sufficient until lunch-time, even 
if he was not sent out, meanwhile, to gather news. 

But Felix now rarely escaped the newspaper office. 

From many such excursions he had returned in a 
state of mind more suitable for highly imaginative 
writing than for veracious. At length, the editor, 
with a smile of mysterious benignity, had assigned 
Felix to the “copy desk” — a table six feet square in 
the midst of the office pandemonium — where the 
young man sat all day, in the company of three 
mature journalists, correcting, reducing, and entitling 
the manuscripts of reporters. Felix took pleasure in 
slashing with a blue pencil the work of Johnny Livy 
— a married man at last, with two instalments paid 
on a frame cottage in the Bronx, where he had a fine 
expanse of vacant lots on every side, a garden, the 
size of a counterpane, bristling with stakes for peas 


EMMA 


279 


and lima beans to twine on, a street lamp directly 
before his porch, and an heir in prospect. More- 
over, Livy was now referred to by “copy-boys” as 
“the star reporter.” In fact, his modest dreams 
were all in process of fulfilment. 

He was moved, one day, to acquaint Felix with the 
reason for this. It was very simple: he had become 
a Christian Scientist. 

“An elementary soul,” thought Felix, his lip 
curling. “A mind without metaphysical sense, with- 
out ability for introspection and observance, for great 
doubts or great sins. A man who can deny that pain 
and ruin exist, who always sees the world as does 
a child on a clear day. What immense regions of 
experience are closed to him! Better to suffer, than 
to be half alive, like that!” And, as Livy marched 
jauntily from the office on a fresh hunt for news, 
Felix returned to his copy-reading, which he detested. 

He missed the excitement of the chase throughout 
the city, the swiftly alternating contact with comedy 
and tragedy, the variety of excessive scenes unveiled 
to the reporter, who enjoyed continually the nervous 
gratification felt by those witnessing, in safety, a rescue 
of life, a ruinous conflagration, the death of a criminal, 
the room where a murder had just been committed. 
The editor, with whose professional phlegm a consti- 
tutional kindliness often struggled for expression, had 
deprived Felix of two “stimulants” instead of one. 

As a result, every afternoon, when the last edition 
of The Evening Sphere had gone to press, his pent-up 
appetite for excitement demanded satisfaction. After 


280 


PREDESTINED 


lingering in cafes on the way uptown, he reached 
Washington Square with the feeling of defenceless- 
ness — as if at the weakening of delicate protective 
qualities — which invariably prefaced his inebriety. 

Once, when in such a state, he approached his 
hotel to see, before the entrance, a familiar-looking 
figure in blue serge. It was Corquill, who had called 
for the purpose of asking Felix out to dinner. 

This invitation irritated the young man : it seemed 
to him that the novelist, trading, perhaps, on the two- 
hundred-dollar loan, was subjecting him to a sort of 
espionage. Planting himself firmly on his heels, he 
enunciated, carefully: 

“Many thanks. But it’s impossible this evening.” 

The celebrity, at that rebuff, only nodded gravely. 

“Well, then, some other time.” 

As Corquill turned away, Felix, ashamed of him- 
self, suggested that they walk a short distance up 
Fifth Avenue together. They set out northward 
through Washington Square. 

In the light of the sunset, beneath masses of 
autumnal leafage, some vagabonds, occupying 
wooden benches, rested unshaven chins on soiled 
shirt-bosoms, or let large, red hands hang down in 
front of threadbare knees. One fellow, small and 
frail, his broken shoes stretched out, his beard up- 
tilted, a felt hat covering his face, gave vent to a suc- 
cession of rattling snores. 

“The reward of his desires,” was CorquilPs com- 
ment. 

Felix, in low, unsteady tones, retorted: 


EMMA 


281 


“ Perhaps he, too, in the only way he knows, is a 
seeker after the ideal.” 

A poor way, according to Corquill, if his business 
were the reproduction of his findings. But, for that 
matter, it was the same in any work: temperance 
and achievement went hand in hand, as did excess 
and failure. All tales of genius accentuated by 
drugs and drink were absurd. To Poe, De Quincey, 
Coleridge, even Baudelaire and Verlaine, common 
sense had given, at last, the credit for their achieve- 
ments. It was in the sober hour that a man produced 
work acceptable to others. 

But Felix was staring at a distant clock with an air 
of stupefaction. 

“Is it possible! An hour later than I thought! 
Will you pardon me?” 

And he took himself off, consumed with chagrin 
and rage. 

So he had come to the pass where his friends be- 
lieved they had to bombard him, at every meeting, 
with remonstrances ! That settled it ; he would show 
them, now, one and all! 

When in his sober senses, he discovered that each 
good determination was weakened by the memory 
of countless similar pledges, made only to be broken. 
The piled-up failures of his will had become a 
crushing incubus, under which he struggled ever the 
more feebly. 

But late at night, when his desires were satiated, 
when he was flushed with self-confidence, he made 
vows apparently so easy of accomplishment that he 


282 


PREDESTINED 


went to bed convinced that the morrow would usher 
in a different sort of life. In the morning, waking to 
find his cravings once more active, he relapsed, with 
scarcely a thought of his midnight resolutions. 

Nevertheless, a cancerous remorse robbed every 
aberrant act of pleasure. At the bottom of each 
draught lay bitter dregs. 

Therefore, his hours were punctuated with little 
struggles and defeats. When he had smoked till he 
felt premonitions of nausea, when he had drunk till 
mental clarity was slipping from him, he threw away 
his tobacco, or emptied his decanter down the waste- 
pipe. This necessitated his buying more cigars and 
whiskey — an expensive process for a young man liv- 
ing on twenty-five dollars a week. 

Such conflicts gradually filled his life, engrossed 
his thoughts, nearly drove from his consciousness all 
appreciation of the outer world. In the newspaper 
office, his work was insufficient ; at home, his writing 
came to a standstill. This paralysis of energy in- 
creased his wretchedness. 

If only he could escape the neighborhood of his 
temptations! Oh, for some Arcadian spot far be- 
yond the zone of provocation, some remote, un- 
sullied isle, where, in a tropic silence, in a solitude 
that was not loneliness, one might live caressed by 
pure winds and pellucid waves, thrilled by the savor 
of the sea and the aroma of flowers, the heart expand- 
ing to perfection beneath friendly stars! But such 
regions existed only in imagination, or in another 
world than his. The prisoner of his environment, he 


EMMA 283 

could not escape one of its detriments — not even 
Emma. 

As for her, maybe she accepted his weakness — 
despite her belief that it rendered him susceptible to 
“ every pretty face” — as something which made asso- 
ciation with him possible. Resting her small, soft 
hands on his shoulders in an almost insidious caress, 
she would murmur: 

“Why do you torment yourself by fighting against 
your nature? If you changed, you would be some one 
else — not yourself. No, no; she wants him as he is!” 

Watching her gloomily, Felix asked: 

“Did you give that advice to your husband?” 

When she had comprehended this question, she 
replied, in haste: 

“ It was different with him. I should have known 
what was going to happen : the weakness was in his 
family. But with you, it’s just that you’re young. 
All young men are so; and, when they’re like you, 
they get over it naturally, as you will.” 

“How do you know that I’ll get over it?” 

She crept closer, and gazed at him in adoration. 

“Ah, because of something about you, I don’t 
know what, that makes me sure! Just to look at 
you one can tell you’ve got great things before you. 
It shines in your eyes; it makes me feel small, and 
frightened, and jealous. Sometimes, I say to my- 
self, ‘How I wish he didn’t have it!’ But all the 
while, I know that on account of it I worship you.” 
And, clinging to him, she began to tremble, and to 
sob: 


284 


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“You’ll never leave me? You’ll never leave me?” 

Then, suddenly, her fingers sank into his shoulders ; 
her lips parted on her teeth ; in her white face her eyes 
blazed as if through a tragic mask. Wildly, she 
declared : 

“If you did, it would mean that all my suspicions 
were true, that there were others! All right; take 
warning ; it would be your last act on earth ! Should 
I care what I did, then?” 

Doubtless they became frightened simultaneously; 
for she threw herself on his neck, besought pardon, 
protested, in broken accents, that “she didn’t mean 
it.” Felix sent forth a silent prayer for Lew’s 
return. 

If he but knew the fellow’s whereabouts! “There 
must be some way of forcing a man to live with 
an inoffensive wife.” But Lew had vanished, as it 
seemed, forever, in that maze of barrooms which 
Felix now penetrated nightly. 

“His work” was his excuse to leave Emma early 
in the evening. From Waverley Place he set out 
with the words, which no longer deluded him, “For 
the last time.” 

Leaning against a bar, in the company of garrulous 
strangers, he passed, sometimes, from an ostensible 
stimulation of brain and body to a reactionary torpor, 
and, on rare occasions of protracted drinking, to an 
extinguishment of all conscious faculties. In this 
plight, he rambled blindly at large, engaged in 
unknown adventures, next morning woke in his bed 
without remembrance of arriving home. But wher- 


EMMA 


285 

ever he went, Pat was at his heels, peering upward 
with the bewildered look of a dog that misses intui- 
tively in his master the intelligence which guides 
their intercourse. 

Once Felix came to his senses bolt upright in an 
alley thick with lamp-posts, where fire-escapes 
dangled in mid-air, and, in the shabby doorways 
of invisible houses, black visages seemed hovering 
without bodies underneath. Negroes were pressing 
round him; his ears buzzed with whispers of a 
sinister intonation ; a hand began to feel his pockets. 

He jerked himself loose, and swung his fists at 
random. The snarl of a dog was followed by a 
scream of pain. 

Felix struggled desperately to regain his vision. 
The scene cleared; he saw a swarm of aboriginal 
faces closing in. But another howl resounded. 

“Kill the dog! Don’t shoot toward the cobbles! 
Get a club!” 

A husky voice, at Felix’s elbow, bellowed, in reply: 

“That’ll do, now! Any more out of the bunch 
of yez, and I’ll call the reserves to break every head 
in the block.” 

And, in the ensuing hush, a fat Irishman, wearing 
a sack suit and a derby hat, escorted Felix from the 
alley. 

They walked, as Felix thought, for miles. They 
rode in a trolley-car, where a conductor protested 
against admitting the bull-terrier till Felix’s pro- 
tector drew from his trousers pocket, along with a 
handful of small change, a nickel badge. Presently, 


286 


PREDESTINED 


trees surrounded them: they were in Washington 
Square. And Felix reached his room in the hotel 
before realizing that he had not once observed the 
features of the detective, or obtained his name, or 
thanked him for his services. 

Next day, the young man was smitten with horror 
and disgust. But was this horror salutary, would 
this disgust be permanent? He feared that there 
was no strength for good left in him. Yet were not 
some men able to draw strength from God ? 

That night, he went to church. 

It was a breathless evening in September — an 
evening of mysterious streets, of blue stars, of purple 
skies into which the upper stories of tall buildings 
melted, so that high-set, golden window lights sug- 
gested the casements of an imminent heaven. On 
Fifth Avenue, at Fiftieth Street, there rose above a 
gray bulk the twin spires of the Roman Catholic 
cathedral. 

Within, all was vague, cool, and subtly scented 
with stale incense fumes: one breathed a redolence 
like the exhalation from a tomb where something 
imperial and ancient lies embalmed in fragrant 
spices. 

Lengthwise of the cathedral, on either side of the 
centre aisle, six massive columns, pale below, grow- 
ing dusky in mid-air, towered to an indistinct region 
of groined arches. Behind each colonnade, under 
sombrous expanses of stained glass, appeared some 
lateral chapels, unilluminated, furnished with effigies 
or pictures. But far ahead, beyond the perspective 


EMMA 


287 

of the columns, beyond parallel pew-backs seemingly 
as innumerable as the ripples of the sea, beyond pul- 
pit, chancel rail, and rising steps, a refulgence, as of 
a sun, dispelled the shadows, and, in its core, the 
white reredos, rich with sculptured ornament, floated 
upward from behind the sparkling altar. 

Felix entered the last pew, sat down, and gazed at 
the remote splendor of the sanctuary. Here, surely, 
one should be able to feel the presence of a deity. 
Should he pray? In what words, with what assur- 
ance of an auditor? 

Men, after all, had evolved with their own hands 
the grandeur of this place — had raised the altar, had 
composed the reredos, had lighted the candles, had 
produced the whole effect. ^Esthetically, it was sat- 
isfying ; but who knew if a god was satisfied to call 
this his especial abode ? 

Something within him answered, “God is wher- 
ever hearts are laid bare in supplication.” 

“Why, then he must be here.” 

A few heads showed above the pew backs ; to the 
right, before the nearest lateral chapel, a woman was 
kneeling; occasionally a worshipper entered from 
the street, dipped finger in a marble basin, crossed 
himself, bowed toward the altar, noiselessly glided 
down the aisle. 

Lowered faces, timid attitudes, and sinking knees; 
the life-long repetition of historic gestures of humility; 
awe and fear unshaken by the eternal silence. Not 
the part of these to cry out, “Whence, why, and 
whither?” or to send forth the plaint, “How do I 


288 


PREDESTINED 


know that there are ears to listen ?” For them, the 
path worn broad by myriads of feet; but for Felix, 
the labyrinth. 

He rose, and turned his back on the altar. The 
woman kneeling before the chapel attracted his atten- 
tion. He approached her. It was Miss Qewan. 
Her eyes remained fixed on a statuette of the Virgin ; 
the beads of a rosary slipped through her fingers; 
her lips were moving. 

“Well for her,” thought Felix, and went away. 

Yet, if there was no omnipresent Ideal, whence this 
universal instinct for self-betterment ? Every hour, 
it struggled for foothold in his heart, warred with 
his frailty, and suffered agonies at defeat. Like the 
Mahomet of Victor Hugo, Felix could have said, “I 
am the vile field of sublime combats.” 

His conscience, from so much friction, became 
raw: he reached that state of nervousness, border- 
ing on hysteria, which is full of morbid scruples con- 
cerning even the slightest misdemeanors. His every 
act appeared despicable to him; and in this moral 
revulsion was included the thought of his behavior 
toward Emma. Without even the excuse of love, he 
had involved that pliant, defenceless creature in his 
transgressions! 

Emma, however, still ignorant of his nocturnal 
drinking-bouts, aware only of an intemperance which, 
in comparison with Lew’s, seemed moderate, could 
not have understood Felix’s low spirits. She ascribed 
them, no doubt, when her suspicions of his disloyalty 
were not active, to that incomprehensible attribute, 


EMMA 


289 


an “ artistic temperament.” She had picked up 
somewhere the idea that genius was to be measured 
by eccentricity; in consequence, the more peculiar 
Felix’s behavior, the surer Emma felt that he was 
developing into a prodigy. In fact, her belief in his 
talents and prospects was so firm, that when speaking 
of his future she became excited, as if in thought she 
were sharing the fame and fortune she predicted for 
him. Then her face clouded, and she remained 
staring at him with lips aquiver, beseechingly. 
Sometimes, she would end a long silence with an out- 
burst of sobs, in which expressions of fear for her 
own future were mingled with wishes that she had 
never seen him. “It had been her undoing.” 

Such statements completed, so to speak, the lacera- 
tion of his conscience. Seized with a pity as de- 
moralizing as love, he strove to comfort Emma by 
adding his compunction to hers, by mingling with 
her tears his own, by stammering that he was, indeed, 
a villain. 

At this cue, she was quick to enter on a new part. 
She began systematically to weave herself into his 
remorses. 

She recalled her childhood, her convent days, her 
maidenhood, with a wealth of anecdotes, touching in 
their simplicity, to show how devoutly and inno- 
cently she had begun, how admirable had been her 
fitting for an edifying life. She recurred to her years 
of matrimony, throughout which — one gathered — 
she had remained submissive to misfortune, faithful 
to her unfaithful husband, confident in her darkest 


290 


PREDESTINED 


hours of the near presence of God. “But now! 
It’s all changed : I can never go back to the convent ; 
I can never find heart to enter a church, or make con- 
fession, or pray to the Virgin! Oh, do you know 
you’ve brought me to a terrible pass?” 

These lamentations, appearing logical enough to 
his distracted mind, were of a quality to give the 
screw its last turn. He had, it seemed, deprived her 
wantonly of the very spiritual support that he was 
groping for. Thenceforth, it was Felix who be- 
sought indulgence, and Emma who condescended to 
lenity. He discovered that a tortured conscience 
could engender a sense of obligation no less strong 
than if produced by passion. 

How should he expiate this offence? By leaving 
her? Too late! Besides, even if he could have 
gathered sufficient power of will to do so, she would 
undoubtedly have pursued him, with who knew what 
consequences. He had for one moment seen her 
face, habitually weak and tender, transformed by the 
insane rage of jealousy. There was another woman 
concealed in her, of whom he was afraid: when he 
scrutinized her lowered eyelashes, lax mouth, and 
listless hands, he was like a voyager gazing on a 
placid flood, with the realization that beneath its 
calm lie hidden the elements of fatal storms. 

His sick nerves no longer had resiliency enough for 
any contest; he suffered at once from lassitude, con- 
trition, mental incoherency, and foreboding. Again 
he asked himself helplessly the old question, “What 
will the outcome be?” Nothing had been heard of 


EMMA 


291 

Lew for nearly a year: every day the chance of his 
return seemed slighter. 

Emma talked of applying for a divorce. No 
court in the State could well refuse her a favorable 
decree; and then at least she would be legally at 
liberty. “ Suppose, ” she asked Felix, sighing, “you 
had met me when we were younger, and I was 
free?” 

It chanced, one night, when she was seated in her 
chair, sewing, that he discovered on the bureau a 
scrap of paper, scribbled over in her handwriting 
with the name, “Emma Piers.” She started, made 
as if to rise, and put out a detaining hand. Then she 
subsided; a wave of red swept across her cheeks; 
and, while stitching rapidly, she ventured: 

“Have you ever noticed how like our two names 
are?” 

But their eyes met, and neither was deceived when 
he returned, in a strange voice: 

“Why yes, it’s almost a coincidence. What are 
you working at so hard?” 

“Something of yours.” 

She darned his stockings, mended his shirts, tight- 
ened loose buttons on his coats. Articles of his apparel 
were always lying near her work-basket; his books 
decorated her mantel-shelf; his cigars were in her 
bureau drawer. He had to confess that her room 
had come to seem more homelike to him than his 
own. 

Then, too, she now took care of the bull-terrier 
while Felix was downtown at work: it was from her 


292 


PREDESTINED 


doorway that Pat sprang upon his master, every even- 
ing, in ecstatic welcome. But Emma’s domination 
did not yet include the dog. 

“Look at him, Felix! When you’re here, he won’t 
come if I call, he won’t even glance at me. And 
all I do for him: all the petting he gets when we’re 
alone, all the chicken-bones! A grateful animal, I 
must say! You bad dog, come here, sir! Felix, 
send him to me.” 

“Pat, go to your mistress.” 

At that last word, her eyes glowed, and she 
smothered the reluctant brute with kisses. 

One night in October, Felix entered to find her 
huddled in a chair, her arms hanging limply toward 
the carpet, her face swollen from weeping, her mouth 
a thin, crooked line telling of poignant grief sup- 
pressed. He stood still, oblivious to Pat’s onslaught 
— sickened by a premonition of calamity. 

“Something has happened? What is it?” 

Fixing him with a look of unutterable woe, she 
held out a telegram. 

“Read that,” she gasped. 

He could not have grown fainter if the telegram had 
been his death-warrant. It was from the superin- 
tendent of a public hospital in Chicago, and an- 
nounced “the decease of Lewis Meers, from serous 
meningitis.” 

After a while, his lips formed the words: 

“It seems to affect you deeply.” 

Indignantly, she cried out : 

“Oh, have I a heart of stone? Can I forget the 


EMMA 


293 


past — all the happy days when I was in love for the 
first time ? Yes, yes, he made me happy once! And 
now, he’s dead; he’ll never come back; he’ll be 
buried way off there — my own husband, who took 
me home from the altar!” 

She rose, galvanized, as it were, by a new thought. 
She approached Felix, and wound her arms deliber- 
ately about him. Her head sank back and from 
beneath her dishevelled hair two blinding flames 
leaped forth. In a breathless voice, she uttered 
what, to his whirling senses, was no mere statement, 
but a command: 

“Now I have no one in the world but you!” 

In this form, then, his expiation descended on 
him? 

The same week, they were married. 


CHAPTER XIV 


One driven by violent passions upon a field of 
honor, and there brought low, grows sane enough in 
his extremity to utter from the heart, “So all my 
great dreams are wrecked by the hallucinations of an 
hour!” Thus Felix, seeing on Emma’s finger the 
new wedding ring. 

It was as if she had resumed before his eyes all the 
faults he had discerned in her at their first acquaint- 
ance. Her physical and mental deficiencies, her 
social and educational shortcomings, in fine, her every 
imperfection, reinvested her, like a depreciating 
dowry, to reduce to a chap-fallen state that young 
man who, his life long, had sighed so windily for a 
perfect sentimental union. And to this relationship, 
of which he had already wearied, he was bound, it 
seemed, till death. “Well, the catastrophe was of a 
piece with his whole career. Fate was in it — the 
workings of an unknown power malevolently dis- 
posed.” 

As for Emma, a few words read by a stranger from 
a prayer-book, a circlet of gold to wear, an engrossed 
certificate to cherish, and she was as happy as if 
assured of ten thousand cloudless days. Now for 
the home of her pent-up desires, wherein her joy 
might come to its full flower! 

294 


EMMA 


295 


After rummaging half the city without any evi- 
dence of fatigue, she informed Felix excitedly that 
the ideal place was found. For thirty-five dollars 
a month one could rent four rooms and a bath in 
a flat-house on Second Avenue below Fourteenth 
Street. 

“Second Avenue !” he ejaculated, in dismay. 

“But, my darling, you don’t know the district. A 
beautiful, broad street with trolley-cars, old-fash- 
ioned, brown-stone boarding-houses opposite, with 
high steps, and trees in real front yards, scarcely a 
shop in sight, and Stuyvesant Square only two short 
blocks to the north. I admit the rooms aren’t big; 
but then, think of the price for such a genteel 
location!” 

“Genteel, with the Bowery practically beginning 
one block westward?” 

But he should be able to hide his declension well in 
such a spot? 

The flat was on the third floor of a yellow brick 
building with two fire-escapes suspended from top to 
bottom of the facade. In the entry, one observed a 
double row of metal letter-boxes, name-plates, and 
bell-buttons. The front door was opened from the 
various apartments by means of an automatic latch. 
Darkness enshrouded the steep staircases; at each 
landing appeared four doors with frosted glass panels 
upon which, as one passed, were stamped occasion- 
ally, in silhouette, sharp, female profiles with frowsy 
hair, in listening attitudes. Entering the flat, one 
stood in a “parlor,” its area about twelve feet by ten, 


PREDESTINED 


296 

its walls papered in a pattern of flamboyant poppies, 
its mantel-piece, an exceptional specimen of jig-saw 
work, painted white and then daubed with ara- 
besques of gilt. This nook gave upon the bed- 
chamber, still smaller, and ventilated by an air-shaft. 
Thence one had access, through the bathroom, to- 
the dining-room, of the same size as the parlor, though 
not so well off for decorations. The kitchen ended 
the suite, with a gas stove, a wash-tub, a cupboard, 
and a sink, encroaching on the floor space. 

Emma, however, was enthusiastic, and, as Felix 
put on the air of a man who no longer cares what 
happens, they rented the flat. 

She got out of storage the relics of her former 
matrimonial venture. Some Brussels carpet, by 
dint of dexterous patching, was made to cover the 
floors. A marble-topped table and three chairs of 
Flemish oak — the chair- backs ornamented with hand- 
painted dogs’ heads — furnished the parlor. A brass 
bedstead and a bureau filled the sleeping-chamber, 
while the dining-room was rendered nearly imprac- 
ticable by a plethora of walnut chairs. Besides these 
articles, Emma had saved not only her best china- 
ware, table linen, and blankets, but also some knick- 
knacks that caused Felix to marvel at the effrontery 
of their manufacturers. All the same, one had 
Emma to thank — and, indeed, Lew as well — for a 
considerable saving of expense. 

She unearthed a crayon portrait of the defunct 
benefactor; and Felix inspected, in silence, the like- 
ness of a robust-looking fellow with staring eyes and a 


EMMA 


297 

romantic mustache. He thought his predecessor 
ridiculous. 

By tacit agreement, the crayon portrait was shoved 
behind the bureau. When the mirror had been 
slightly tilted, Felix was sometimes startled to see 
Lew’s eyes peering at him through the crack. 

Emma, with these souvenirs round her, was moved 
frequently to reverie. She recalled, with solemn face, 
the day when she had selected the Brussels carpet, 
when her late mother-in-law had presented her with 
the steel engraving of “ Queen Victoria and the Prince 
Consort,” when her first husband, while still a bride- 
groom, had brought home the bisque statuette of an 
infant crawling on all fours — a gift intended to ap- 
pease her dissatisfaction at not yet having a baby of 
her own. Through empty years, she had come to 
regard this image with a melancholy tenderness: it 
embellished the parlor maniel-piece, and the dusting 
of it was a ceremony. 

They employed no servant: Emma declared she 
would not willingly have had one anyway, just then. 
She was free again to bustle in a kitchen of her own, 
there to concoct, every afternoon, dainties for some 
one she loved. Felix was apt to find her at the 
bread-board, her plump forearms covered with flour, 
a checkered apron drawn tight across her breast, her 
face made girlish by a smile at once mysterious and 
doting. 

“ Guess what I’ve got for my boy’s dinner to-night ! ” 

“Poor little Emma,” thought Felix, and, despite 
her apparent conviction that here a demigod was 


PREDESTINED 


298 

stooping, he insisted on learning how to dry the 
dinner dishes. Straightening herself before the dish- 
pan, she would say, with dewy eyes: 

“Some time, we’ll look back at these first days and 
laugh.” 

But how could she fit herself for companionship 
with him in that apotheosis? She tried furtively to 
understand his books, to improve her chirography and 
spelling, to learn the French language from a primer 
bought at the corner news-stand. 

Felix, however, made small progress toward fame 
and affluence. His “inspirations” — rarer than ever 
in this unaesthetic spot — were smothered, as it were, 
at their incipience by kitchen vapors. Soaring fan- 
cies descended with a crash at the rattle of dishes 
and the clacking of dumb-waiter ropes; the pen 
slipped from his fingers; he sat contemplating the 
gilded mantel-piece and the hand-painted chair- backs 
with a sensation of being lost far from his own. Fre- 
quently, he was oppressed by such despair as one 
feels in a nightmare the motive of which is some vast, 
irremediable misfortune. Finally, his irritability, at 
the slightest gusts of disagreeable occurrences blazed 
into rage; and the brunt of all his outbursts had to 
be borne by Emma. He considered, indeed, that she 
was responsible “for everything.” 

He chafed at her grammatical errors, her bour- 
geois tastes, her interminable tales of Lew, her trite 
caresses. He rediscovered the little horizontal scar 
across her nose; and the sound of her small teeth 
crunching celery exasperated him. The dozen pho- 


EMMA 


2 99 


tographs of her, all hanging against the parlor walls, 
seemed to multiply, to an extent almost unbearable, 
her personality. 

Sometimes, he came home half tipsy, could not 
endure the thought of spending an entire evening in 
the flat, escaped the house on false errands, returned 
toward midnight, dizzy and sullen. Her amazement 
at discovering the full extent of his indulgences in- 
creased his choler. Violent scenes ensued. 

“Oh, that I should have all this to go through 
again! When you come home so, my old life rushes 
back to me, and I could almost die!” 

“If I don’t suit you, why were you so keen on 
catching me?” 

“Ah, to reproach me with my love! But did I 
ever suspect that you were going to remind me so 
much of the other?” 

“The other! That’s all I hear. A devilish pity 
he kicked the bucket!” 

She rolled up her large eyes, fell back against the 
wall, clapped both hands to her bosom. 

“My heart! It’ll break some day — yes, and you’ll 
be glad.” 

Perhaps, at such a moment, he looked curiously 
at her face, small and white, dazed by the calamity 
of their quarrel; and, in a return to rationality, he 
understood that it was no stranger, but his own wife, 
whom he was harrying. His immediate remorse 
drew poignancy not alone from her wild eyes and 
tragic pose, but from every trivial appurtenance to 
that scene as well — her home-made dress, her rough- 


3 °° 


PREDESTINED 


ened finger-tips, the garish parlor ornaments, her 
treasures, epitomizing all too pathetically the limita- 
tions of her nature, her past, and her indubitable 
destiny. He heard her voice wailing, “ Whenever I 
love you most, whenever I give myself to you utterly, 
then I’m about to suffer the worst. Last night I 
loved you insanely, more than God; and I think 
He’s punishing me for it now.” 

“Emma, Emma, let me hear you say that you for- 
give me.” 

“ Oh, I must ; for I have only you ! ” 

Kind words and kisses were, in fact, so potent an 
anodyne for her despair that, after such episodes, 
she could fall asleep with phrases of endearment, ren- 
dered half incoherent by drowsiness, lingering on her 
lips. 

In the morning, he woke to see, in the gloom of the 
bedroom, her thick braids of black hair spread upon 
the pillow, her eyelids nearly lost in shadows, and all 
her maturity smoothed out by sleep or softened by 
the dusk. Then, at his prolonged scrutiny, her eyes 
opened; and her first, vague impulse was to detain 
him. 

In the evening, after dinner, they sat by the win- 
dow, looking out on Second Avenue. Winter had 
reached the city : in the small, oblong yards of board- 
ing-houses across the street, some trees thrust forth 
bare limbs, etiolated by the pale lavender glimmer of 
an arc lamp. Their shadows covered the brown- 
stone walls with a semblance of great, intersecting 
fissures. Occasionally, on the illuminated window- 


EMMA 


3 01 

shades, there moved prefigurations monstrous and 
indefinite. 

After the middle of December, one could glimpse, 
beyond the corner of Fourteenth Street, many per- 
sons moving to and fro before, bright shop-windows. 

In Christmas week, Felix remembered that his 
credit was still unimpaired in a jewelry shop on Fifth 
Avenue. There he selected, and had charged to his 
account, a gold bracelet set with small turquoises. 
But when, on Christmas morning, he slipped this 
trinket upon Emma’s wrist, she, with an excited 
laugh, produced a diamond finger-ring worth at 
least two hundred dollars. She had spent on this 
gift a fourth of her remaining patrimony. 

Covering his frowns with her hands, she explained, 
anxiously : 

“I wanted so much to get you a fur-lined overcoat, 
but I was afraid you wouldn’t care for anything but 
sable.” 

All the tastes that she ascribed to him were of the 
most “ aristocratic ” sort. Though he had grown too 
cautious intentionally to acquaint this jealous creat- 
ure with many details of his past, she was convinced 
that Felix, “in sowing his wild oats,” had squandered 
a rich inheritance. That was the reason why he now 
avoided all the fashionable and brilliant friends he 
must have had ? So much the better for her ! 

At their Christmas dinner, holly decked the table, 
cider brimmed the goblets, jellies trembled in bowls, 
nuts, raisins, and candies ran over on the cloth, and 
the turkey, flanked by tall clumps of celery, with a 


3°2 


PREDESTINED 


small American flag stuck in its “wishbone/’ was, as 
Emma said, “a whopper.” While they were dining, 
sleet lashed the panes, and the wind moaned in the 
air-shaft. Emma shivered with delight. 

“Just you and I, safe inside! Do you remember, 
it was on a Christmas eve we met?” 

He was thinking of that night, but, at the same time, 
of another woman, green-eyed, with auburn hair. 

Ah, the laughter and the lights, the odors of per- 
fumes and champagne, the roses not so ruddy as the 
lips above them, the glances that united in an imma- 
terial embrace! He fell to wondering whom she 
was deluding, this Christmas night. 

Chance brought him, soon afterward, a partial 
satisfaction of that curiosity. 

He had begun to patronize a saloon conveniently 
situated on Fourteenth Street, near Third Avenue. 
Midway of a row of catchpenny arcades, pawn-shops, 
and ten-cent concert-halls, two show-windows — dis- 
playing against wooden screens some dusty “mag- 
nums” — shut in a swinging door with cut-glass 
panels. Inside, sawdust covered the floor. To the 
left, from front to rear of a long room, extended the 
bar, backed by mirrors against which pyramids of 
glasses rose just high enough to prevent an inebriated 
patron from glimpsing his reflection. To the right, 
were aligned a cashier’s desk, a cigar-stand, and a 
buffet, the last covered with dishes of salt herring, 
pickles, sliced Italian sausage, pretzels, and other 
generators of thirst. From the ceiling hung down 
at intervals chandeliers wrapped round with tin-foil ; 


EMMA 


3°3 


and on the walls were lithographs portraying race- 
horses and pugilists. At the back, a partition con- 
cealed a small, unventilated retreat, reached from 
the pavement by a narrow corridor, where feminine 
customers were served. 

Felix was at first ashamed of himself whenever he 
entered there. In time, however, he got over such 
fastidiousness. 

One afternoon, the cut-glass panels swung inward 
with a crash ; two unprepossessing figures were seen 
struggling on the threshold; and a short fellow, half 
out of his overcoat, plunged headlong into the 
saloon. Rising from the sawdust, he swayed for- 
ward against the bar, at the same time shouting 
thickly over his shoulder: 

“Fll have all I want whenever I want it, and don’t 
you never take it on yourself to interfere with my 
amusements, Mr. Mackeron!” 

Felix turned to the individual thus addressed. It 
was the tenor of “The Lost Venus.” 

This young actor, formerly the admiration of 
“matinee girls,” had grown sallow and emaciated. 
Moreover, the physiognomy that, on the stage of the 
Trocadero Theatre, had expressed many evanescent 
emotions, was now almost vacuous, while the man’s 
pupils, even in the reduced light of the saloon, re- 
mained at pin-point size. 

Mackeron had no sooner shaken hands with Felix 
than he began eagerly to relate his troubles. 

On account of his cigarette-smoking, his singing 
voice had temporarily “gone back on him.” Mont- 


3°4 


PREDESTINED 


morrissy had refused him work, and- “a conspiracy 
of all the prominent theatrical managers in New 
York” had kept him off the boards. Of late, he 
had been employed in a moving-picture manufactory 
where, before a kinetoscopic camera, he took part 
in short, serio-comic pantomimes. But the proprie- 
tor of this establishment — “a pitiful ass” — had 
declared that Mackeron, “an artist noted through- 
out the country for the mobility of his mask,” could 
no longer inject into his face a sufficient evidence 
of feeling. “I tell you, Piers, the whole profession 
hates me for my successes, and is out to down me. 
One man can’t fight them all. What I shall do, 
heaven only knows. Do you happen to have five 
dollars to spare till early to-morrow morning?” 

“I’m sorry, no.” 

Mackeron’s pin-point eyes grew duller. 

“No offence taken,” he muttered, his glance run- 
ning over Felix’s clothes. And, after a moment’s 
hesitation : 

“I suppose you know about Marie Sinjon’s new 
part?” 

Felix set down his highball. To hear, after so 
long a silence, that well-remembered name, made 
his heart beat fast. 

Montmorrissy had provided her with a new ex- 
travaganza called “Poor Pierrette,” of which an 
elaborate production was soon going to have its 
first-night at the Trocadero Theatre. 

So she was in town! 

“Yes, and Noon too, by George, better off than 
ever!” 


EMMA 


305 


Felix wondered whether he ought not to take 
umbrage at that speech. But the other continued: 

“ You remember Noon’s nervous trouble — the way 
he used to twitch his head? Not so long ago, I 
watched him through — I saw him in a restaurant, 
dining, and at first I thought he wasn’t going to be 
able to feed himself!” 

Felix closed his eyes, the better to enjoy this pict- 
ure. Then, to prevent himself from smiling, he 
inquired, hastily: 

“And Nora Llanelly?” 

“There was a decent sort of girl! I don’t know. 
She’s vanished.” 

Further conversation was prevented by the saloon- 
keeper, who demanded that Mackeron remove “his 
friend.” They turned to look at the short drunkard 
in the sawdust-covered overcoat, who, clinging to 
the bar, was weeping because he had been refused 
more whiskey. In his broad face, splotched across 
the nose from alcoholic poisoning, his large lugu- 
brious mouth, his dyed “mutton-chop” whiskers 
and mustache, his inflamed, vacant eyes running 
over with tears, Felix discovered something half 
familiar. Was not this the ex-drummer of the orches- 
tra at the Trocadero Theatre ? Mackeron assented. 

“No friend of mine, you understand. But his 
wife’s a good soul, and home to her he’s going!” 

So the actor dragged the musician forth into the 
street. 

The saloonkeeper’s comment was: 

“There’s the sort that gives this business a bad 
name.” 


PREDESTINED 


3°6 

He was a middle-aged Irishman, the speaker, seri- 
ous-looking, sandy-haired, smooth-shaven, display- 
ing over his left cheek-bone a deep cicatrice, where 
an unruly customer had once struck him with “ brass 
knuckles.” In his boyhood, a barefoot immigrant 
from “the old country” dumped into the slums, he 
had quickly learned to endure all privations, to 
return blows, to run from policemen, to avoid liquor, 
and to doff his cap to priests. Ward politicians had 
soon found in him, at election time, a youth at once 
shrewd, devoted, and eager for profitable combat 
at the polls. From the captaincy of voters he had 
worked his way, through various kindred offices, to 
a position of influence in Tammany Hall, the head- 
quarters of the Democratic political machine in New 
York. Now, at forty-nine, he was the proprietor of 
many ballots in his district, the owner of a lucra- 
tive business which he considered no less reputable 
than any merchant’s, a widower with two small 
children, a total abstainer, and an occasional wor- 
shipper at mass. His chief desire was to rear his 
daughters in “good style”; and he had casually 
inquired of Felix, to whom he made himself agree- 
able, “if they’d be apt to think much of pedigrees 
in them young ladies’ finishing schools uptown?” 
All the same, Mr. Quilty’s remote ancestors had, it 
seemed, “worn crowns in Ireland.” 

Despite this, he thought nothing of taking off his 
coat, when trade was brisk, and serving drinks across 
the bar. 

Then the lights of the foil-wrapped chandeliers 


EMMA 


307 


struck through a blue zone of tobacco smoke upon 
a phalanx of tilted derby hats. The customers, 
crowded one against another, with difficulty accom- 
plished the large gestures called for by their un- 
natural exuberance; but, on the other hand, their 
proximity made easier those unpremeditated confi- 
dences, those secret promises of favor, those touching 
avowals of regard, which signalize such moments. 
On all sides, mouths opened to emit unbridled 
laughter, or snapped shut in counterfeit decision; 
eyes winked and looked unutterable wisdom; faces 
were wreathed in rapturous grins, contracted inor- 
dinately with cunning, relaxed in doleful reverie. 
Late at night, some imbibed, apparently, elixirs of 
transfiguring properties: old men grew young in 
mien and impulse, young men decrepit in attitude 
and spirit, while the timid turned fierce, and the 
turbulent propitiable. 

In these scenes, Felix now regularly took his place. 

Presently, it was as if, from rubbing against so 
many shabby costumes, an indefinite suggestion of 
shabbiness had been transferred to him. One day, 
he realized that cab-drivers, as he passed them on 
the street, no longer solicited his patronage. 

He could not spare the money to renew his cloth- 
ing, which, after long service, seemed suddenly 
impaired at every point. Indeed, Johnny Livy, 
whose Bohemian habiliments had once made his 
company in Broadway restaurants a questionable 
satisfaction, was now generally as well-dressed as 
Felix. The latter did not hesitate to ask the “star 


PREDESTINED 


308 

reporter” for loans, or to approach, on the same 
business, friends in the newspaper office whom he 
caught wearing optimistic smiles. At last, on seeing 
such expressions fade away the moment he grew 
confidential, Felix plucked up courage, marched into 
the editorial cubbyhole, and demanded an increase 
of salary. The editor regretted to inform him that 
his work, instead of gaining value, had depreciated. 

“With us, you see, efficiency is what counts — 
never sentimental inclination, though sometimes we 
would like to make that do so. But here, unfortu- 
nately, we are all parts of a machine. When a part 
fails ” 

The journalist gazed into space, slowly shook his 
fragile-looking head, and turned to his desk. Felix 
went home with a heavy heart. 

The money that he gave Emma every Saturday 
for housekeeping expenses represented for him just 
so many cigars and highballs missed; as the week 
drew to a close, and his empty pockets necessitated 
abstinence, he could not help blaming her for his 
consequent discomfort. At such times, a sullen ani- 
mosity invaded him. The dinners which she had 
racked her brain to make at once tempting and inex- 
pensive, he ate with lowered brow, in silence; while 
she was trying to interest him in cheerful topics, he 
was pondering schemes for the replenishment of his 
wallet. “What a pity that all his jewelry was in 
pawn! His books, then? He could not bear to 
part with one of them. Of his clothing, there was 
not a suit worth a decent price.” Such was his 


EMMA 


309 


desperation, that he examined all the forks and 
spoons for sterling marks. Then, with a start, he 
recoiled from his intention, as much aghast as a 
somnambulist waking to find himself on the threshold 
of a crime. 

Nevertheless, he often appraised the diamond 
finger-ring — his Christmas present from Emma. 
But, of course, she would remark its absence from 
his hand. 

“Just so: it was she who balked him, in some 
way, at every point !” 

And, when the struggle against his craving, or the 
desire to indulge it, had stretched his nerves to a 
tension almost intolerable, any trivial annoyance 
caused him to turn on Emma in a fury. His voice 
high and unsteady, he would exclaim : 

“Will you be so good as to stop that endless 
humming? My God, I should like a little peace, 
now and then, in my own house !” 

The light died in her large eyes; her face seemed 
to wither ; and her pale lips barely formed the words : 

“Don’t you swear at me, Felix!” 

At such temerity, a red mist obscured his sight. 

“One of these days you’ll drive me crazy. Then 
look out!” 

She sucked in her lips, while her eyes, never 
leaving his, slowly overflowed. And a thin wail 
rang out: 

“Yes, strike me! It’s nothing new. There’s the 
mark for you: the scar across my nose that Lew 
put there!” 


3io 


PREDESTINED 


His heart, so to speak, turned over. 

“Oh, Emma! Oh, my poor little girl! Never in 
the world, from me!” 

“You say that now. But you’re getting more and 
more like him. It’s a rep’tition, yes, a dreadful 
rep’tition, and this is my life!” 

Still, when a similar quarrel had prostrated her, 
when a physician had been summoned to relieve her 
headache and the palpitations of her heart, Felix 
had only to kneel beside the bed, cover her cheek 
with kisses, and lay some flowers in her languid 
hands. 

“Violets, from my bad boy! Ah, now I want to 
get well this minute, and wear them somewhere.” 

Reconciled, they walked out, on frosty nights, 
over pavements slippery with ice, past ridges of 
dirty snow extending alongside the curbs, toward 
other parts of town than theirs. Thoroughfares 
vivid with the electric signs of “dime museums” and 
saloons gave place to the dim upsweep of office 
buildings; soon a vista with unobstructed altitudes 
appeared, where sombre zones of interwoven 
branches hovered over stretches of unsullied snow; 
then blocks of fashionable shops displayed monoto- 
nously their blind window-panes and iron shutters; 
and, eventually, where unessential trade gave way 
to its sustainers, one was surrounded by massive 
dwelling-houses with gables, tourelles and marble 
vestibules, their shadowy prospect broken, maybe, 
at a distance, by a church spire outlined with stars, 
or by the refulgence of a towerlike hotel ablaze from 


EMMA 


3li 

portico to cornices with lights. Closed automo- 
biles continually glided past : the twin lamps rushed 
forward ; the rectangular window framed pale 
dresses and shirt-bosoms ; the varnished panels 
flashed by; the red tail-light dwindled like a dying 
coal. Emma stared at that flood of equipages bear- 
ing away, to unknown pleasures, the people of an 
alien world. She wanted to halt before a house 
when some woman, cloaked and bareheaded, ran up 
the steps, while a footman in white silk stockings 
held open the door. Through the large windows 
of restaurants she perceived, by the light of candles 
glowing under beaded shades, bare arms, white 
cravats, orchids, jewels, raised champagne glasses. 
Then, all at once, she confessed that she was tired. 
They turned homeward. The mansions were left 
behind, the shops ended at the little park, the office 
buildings gave place to Union Square and Fourteenth 
Street, Second Avenue opened out, and the fire- 
escapes of the flathouse came into view. Among 
the hand-painted chairs, they removed their wraps 
in silence. 

Once they went to the Metropolitan Opera House, 
where they sat in the topmost gallery, close to the 
gilded rafters and the large cupids of the fresco. 
Below, hung four other galleries, the attire of their 
occupants gaining festive quality at each descent, 
till, in the two lowest tiers, fitted out with boxes, 
shimmering decollete dresses, decked with strands of 
pearls or sewn with diamonds, clung to the narrow 
hips of women smaller, apparently, than marion- 


312 


PREDESTINED 


ettes. The house grew dark. Before the audience, 
in a broad trench where screened electric globes shed 
rays on many music-racks, the bows of violins lay 
all aslant, the flutes and horns were raised, two 
drummers cautiously felt the membranes of their 
kettle-drums. The baton fell; a sonorous harmony 
swept upward. 

“Venusberg , s” foliage was disclosed; Tann- 
hauser sat repining by the couch of Venus — she in a 
shining girdle and transparent robes. To notes 
vertiginously passional, bacchantes entered; cries 
burst forth ^ white limbs were tossed about in reck- 
less measures. But weariness seized upon the 
dancers: they fell back into a gathering mist, and 
disappeared. Then the mellow voice of Venus stole 
forth, to fill the auditorium: 

“Geliebter, sag\ wo weilt dein Sinn?” 

“ Where stray thy thoughts ?” To the past, to a 
time when, in an artist’s dusky studio, those same 
tones quivered on the air, to youth tentative and 
yet still uncompromised, to an epoch of boundless 
promise, to the clear, trustful eyes of a young girl. 

Emma, having consulted the programme, whis- 
pered : 

“That is Mme. Regne Lodbrok.” 

“Yes, I ought to know. I used to be a friend of 
hers.” 

His wife leaned forward to devour with her eyes 
the radiant figure on the stage. She did not smile 
again that evening. 

Her jealousy returned, and in a form so tern- 


EMMA 


313 


pestuous that she could not help disclosing all the 
ramifications of her fears. “What chance had 
she” — in effect — “to hold for long a young man 
who had lived amid the allurements of a sumptuous 
environment, who had been at home in the boudoirs 
of famous singers and in the dressing-rooms of 
actresses, who, besides, must have left back there, 
in the region of opera-boxes, closed automobiles, 
and ball-rooms, some elegant, cultivated, beautiful 
young woman ? Indeed, perhaps he had not broken 
all of those old ties ? Why was it that he disappeared 
for hours, to return morose and quarrelsome, without 
excuses for his absence ? Was she to discover, some 
day, that even in faithlessness he resembled Lew?” 

In the morning, she consulted a paper-covered, 
dog-eared volume entitled, “Napoleon’s Dream- 
Book” ; at night, she “told her fortune” with a pack 
of playing-cards. As she laid upon the marble- 
topped table card after card, Emma muttered, 
“Trouble in the house, disagreeable feelings, an 
absence, a light woman between him and me.” 
She looked at Felix strangely. 

“No matter how I shuffle the deck, there’s always 
a light woman between him and me!” 

When, by pretence of the most tender sympathy, 
she had inveigled him into relating anecdotes of 
his more prosperous years, suddenly her dark eyes 
struck fire, and she cried: 

“How carefully you avoid the love-affairs! That 
shows me all the plainer: if you had finished with 
them, you wouldn’t be so wary. But I don’t need 


314 


PREDESTINED 


your confessions; Fm sure without them! Don’t 
I feel it here, in my breast — an awful sinking, that 
comes on sometimes when you’re out, and I’m alone ? 
Ah, don’t think a woman can’t tell!” 

“My dear Emma, this is perfectly absurd.” 

Baffled by his smile, she glared at him. Then 
approaching her face to his, gritting her teeth, and 
rapidly shaking her head, 

“Felix, I could kill you!” 

To hide his uneasiness, he snatched up hat and 
overcoat. 

“I’ll walk about in the open till you come to your 
senses.” 

She screamed after him: 

“Yes, leave your wife! That’s all us wives are 
for!” 

And she collapsed into a chair, with eyeballs fixed, 
and twitching hands. The deuce! One could not 
leave his wife in that predicament ! 

He helped her to bed. There she lay motionless, 
groaning. “She was choking, her brain felt queer, 
her heart was running away.” Then her teeth 
commenced to chatter. Felix brought whiskey, which 
she pushed aside; he wrapped her in blankets; he 
ran to a neighboring apothecary’s for a headache 
remedy. She swallowed one powder, and fell asleep. 

He slipped out with his dog, into the cold. “What 
a life! How long would it continue so? Till 
death?” He stopped in the street, struck his palms 
together, and ejaculated, “It can’t go on! I was 
not born for this. Presently, I shall awake.” 


EMMA 


315 

Pedestrians halted, some distance off, to watch him. 
Felix entered a saloon. 

Now and then, when his hand touched the swing- 
ing doors, he hesitated, drew back, escaped. From 
victories no greater, he derived extravagant hopes. 

But still there came to him at every contempla- 
tion of gayety the same longing, at every sight of 
physical beauty the ineradicable trepidation, at 
every approach to centres of prodigality and license 
the thought, “Alas, I am missing that!” The 
ghosts of old temptations returned to haunt him; 
and one, in the twilight of a February day, took 
corporeal shape. 

On a residential street, a slender woman, wearing 
a long coat of black, 'smooth fur and a black “Rus- 
sian toque,” drew near to Felix. They were on the 
point of passing each other without recognition. 
But the bull-terrier was fawning round her skirts. 

“Eileen!” * 

“You!” 

And they both trembled. 

The rim of her black fur toque pressed down on 
all sides the precise undulations of her coiffure; 
from the full lobes of her ears jet pendants dangled; 
a frill of white lace clung round her chin. That 
unobtrusive exquisiteness of dress, that clear pallor 
and facial delicacy of the “hot-house type” of 
beauty, that very subtle hint of secret ardors, in 
Eileen Tamborlayne remained unimpaired. Even 
the familiar composure almost instantly flowed 
back into her face: she cast a glance up and down 


PREDESTINED 


3 l6 

the dusky street; her eyes cleared of apprehension; 
her lips parted in a mournful smile. 

“My poor Felix, to think we should have this 
painful meeting!” 

Her speech, and her quick recovery of equanimity, 
mortified the young man. With a bitter laugh, he 
returned : 

“Painful, I take it, because of the catastrophe that 
it recalls?” 

Giving him a reproachful look, she started to walk 
on, though in such a way that he committed no 
obtrusion by keeping pace with her. He controlled 
his agitation. He tried to speak indifferently. 

“Is it odd that I should feel some curiosity? For 
three years Fve been in ignorance of your where- 
abouts and fortunes. That seems a long time, per- 
haps? And yet, I’m still interested in what I was 
partially to blame for.” He hesitated,, then blurted 
out: 

“Gregory?” 

“He’s fairly well. Travelling seems to suit him 
best. We seldom get back to New York, these 
days.” 

“You and he are together!” 

She made no immediate reply. At length, with a 
sigh, she allowed the enigmatic phrase to escape her: 

“Sometimes qualities that irk us serve us best in 
the end.” 

When he had considered this carefully, Felix vent- 
ured: 

“Does he ever speak of me?” 


EMMA 


317 


“Ah, my dear, that’s different!” 

He understood everything. She, in some in- 
genious way, had avoided practically all the conse- 
quences; he, while scarcely so guilty, was blamed 
by Gregory Tamborlayne for everything. He 
sneered : 

“In our case, the usual retributions seem to have 
been reversed. I’m the one, apparently, who has 
lost everything of importance.” 

She looked at him askance. 

“Have you been so unfortunate?” 

He shrugged his shoulders. 

“I hadn’t your talents. You see, I was an ama- 
teur.” 

Eileen stood still. Her eyes became humid, her 
lips parted, and her face expressed perfectly the 
resignation of a meek woman misunderstood. She 
faltered : 

“We had best part here.” 

Besides, a lamp-lighter was illuminating the street; 
and two strangers were approaching. She made 
haste with her farewell. 

“You think harshly of me. You ascribe nothing 
to fatality, to your unconsciously exerted influence 
on others, to your own impulses. You don’t remem- 
ber tenderly, as I often do, a season of delicious 
terrors, of sweet miseries. You forget that we 
loved each other.” 

Her chin rose; a well-known, tremulous smile 
appeared; she seemed to be swaying toward him. A 
tremor passed through his body. He seized her hand. 


PREDESTINED 


3i8 

“I remember it all!” he uttered, in choked accents. 

Intense satisfaction shone in her eyes. 

“I want you never to forget it! Be careful: 
people are coming; our moment is over. But we 
cheated fate of one more thrill, didn’t we?” 

Without lowering his hand, Felix watched her 
depart. And not till she had disappeared did he 
remember his humiliating discoveries concerning 
her, or realize that Eileen, moved by the dominant 
impulse of her nature, had again played upon his 
sensibility. He was forced to confess: 

“I don’t seem able to hold my own in any situ- 
ation.” 

It was on the following day that these words were 
more unhappily verified. 

The last edition of The Evening Sphere had gone 
to press, when the editor called Felix into the pri- 
vate office. “It was not a prosperous year; the 
proprietor of the newspaper had ordered a general 
retrenchment; a number of employes would have 
to be laid off for the time being.” In short, after 
much circumlocution, Felix was told that his ser- 
vices were no longer needed. “But, my dear fellow, 
you must be sure to leave me your address. I have 
great hopes of sending for you, when we feel 
wealthier, and you have refreshed yourself with a 
vacation.” The editor smiled gently. “You must 
begin soon to live up to my expectations of you,” 
was his valedictory. 

The flat was redolent of hot lard. In the kitchen, 
Emma, wearing her checkered apron, was cooking 


EMMA 


319 

dinner. She regarded Felix with astonishment and 
pleasure. 

“Some so early?” 

“I’ve lost my job.” 

She displayed a frightened smile 
“That’s not a pretty joke, sweetheart.” 

“It’s the truth. I’ve been discharged.” 

Emma turned to the gas stove, with quivering 
chin. He wondered why his news affected her so 
deeply. From her accounts, this was not by any 
means the first time she had heard those words. 


CHAPTER XV 


The day after his dismissal from The Evening 
Sphere , Felix remembered that he had never yet 
derived material benefit from the good-will of Paul 
Pavin. Forthwith, he hastened to the Velasquez 
Building. In the lobby, a clerk informed him: 

“ Monsieur Pavin has his old studio for the 
winter; but just now he is on a visit in West- 
chester County. However, he is expected back with- 
in the week.” 

‘Til call again.” 

But it seemed an age before Felix parted the 
velveteen curtains, saw a burly pair of shoulders rise 
against the fading “ north light,” and felt his arms 
grasped by two strong hands. 

“ Rascal! I have been in your city seven weeks.” 

Felix began apologies which Pavin cut short. 

“No, I am wrong. We oldish fellows sometimes 
ask too much. In all ways, my faith! Yes, on a 
gray day we discover that age must bait its hook.” 
And he turned on the lights before Felix had re- 
covered from his blushes. 

They sat down for an “old-fashioned talk,” which 
proved to be a gay monologue by the Frenchman 
concerning adventures, in Corfu, Brittany, and Nor- 
way, that could hardly have befallen a decrepit 

320 


EMMA 


321 


man. But when Felix refilled his glass with whiskey 
and soda, Pavin’s mind seemed to wander. At last, 
he said, abruptly: 

“My friend, you are not looking well. Have you 
been ill ? ,y 

Felix ceased to smile. His answer was: 

“Bad luck seems to have been my principal ail- 
ment !” 

The artist smoothed his thick, blond beard re- 
flectively. 

“No fatal malady, that, for youth. I say it who 
know. Mine was, for a while, an open-air hospital : 
trees overhead, iron chairs for beds, a light diet of 
bread, with cheese on feast-days, and much walking 
in thin-soled shoes as part of the discipline. My 
best tonic was observance of the cured.” 

“Your disease had no complications.” 

“And you think that in consequence I have no 
ability to prescribe for your especial case. But why 
does a physician, who flounders through all sorts of 
storms without mishap, say to some one, *1 warn 
you to keep your feet dry’? Because, while not 
susceptible to colds himself, he knows that for cer- 
tain others there is only one way to avoid a danger- 
ous illness. A man must shun the elements that 
don’t agree with him.” 

“Exactly. That’s the plan of this world. All the 
immunity for one, and all the susceptibility for an- 
other! And again, after every act that is not formal, 
the same unfairness in assignment of emotions. For 
you, doubtless, impenitence; but for me, remorse.” 


3 22 


PREDESTINED 


There, according to Pavin, Felix had discredited 
his own grievance. Life — as the Frenchman saw it — 
was made up of the happiness and the unhappiness 
that followed different sorts of conduct. The result 
depended on the degree to which the individual’s 
higher senses had been developed. An undeveloped 
nature would not suffer from the worst acts any 
great contrition; but a nature with fine moral judg- 
ment would get, at each divergence from its ideal of 
conduct, an unhappy reaction. “I for my part,” 
Pavin confessed, “have lived without many scruples 
and, consequently, with few unhappy reactions. In 
that speech, however, I admit a deficiency, a coarse- 
ness of spiritual fibre, a lack of what you have. I 
possess the ‘quality’ necessary for good painting, 
but you own a finer quality — the capacity for deli- 
cate remorse. A cerebral man is tormented with 
countless scruples incomprehensible to the peasant. 
Thus, with his very pains, he buys access to rare 
fields of consciousness, in the far reaches of which 
move the mystics, the delineators of subtle agonies, 
those who have gained their ‘victories over the in- 
visible.’ You have read a book by one of these. 
But as for him, between his remorses and his will, 
the latter was the more delicate.” 

Then, looking at Felix with half-shut eyes, he 
concluded, in the tone of one surprised by a chance 
thought : 

“We must make your resemblance to him end 
short of that.” 

Felix took this opportunity to relate how Buron’s 


EMMA 


323 


book had changed his literary designs, how its perusal 
had been followed by the most exalted aspirations, 
how, for his resultant labors, he had slighted daily 
tasks, to the depletion of his funds, and the refusal 
of his further journalistic services. “Then, close ap- 
plication to work had impaired his health; next, while 
suffering from nervous instability, he had even been 
drawn into an unfortunate marriage ; finally, his ac- 
cumulated troubles had bound him to a habit such as 
one did not easily escape.” In fact, one might have 
thought that all Felix’s woes had begun with Pavin’s 
gift of a volume of French prose. But, during this 
plaint, the portrait-painter seemed almost inattentive. 

“I have bored you with my troubles,” said Felix, 
stiffly. 

“No, I heard everything you said, and with great 
regret, though all the time I was thinking of Buron. 
Do you know, a curious thing has happened, in that 
connection.” And he explained that Mme. Lod- 
brok had seen recently, on Broadway, an ex-dancer, 
half French and half Algerian, once the talk of 
Paris, but now grown ugly, fat, and shabby, who, 
many years before, had disappeared with Pierre 
Buron. This woman, while the opera-singer’s cab 
was turning round, had vanished in the crowd. 
“What a pity,” Pavin commented. “Perhaps she 
could have furnished some illuminating reminis- 
cences — of his death, or the location of his grave?” 

Felix made no reply, being more concerned with 
the thought that his elaborate preliminaries to a 
request for money had been wasted. 


324 


PREDESTINED 


But this was not the case. When the young man 
rose to go, Pavin pressed into his hand a roll of 
banknotes, with the speech: 

“You need two remedies for your bad luck: one, 
a temporary loan — if you will permit me — the other, 
a journey with a friend. In two weeks, I am off 
for Havre. Come and see me to-morrow; we will 
conspire against all obstacles. Mind the tall box 
in the vestibule.” 

There was, indeed, wedged behind the door, a 
flat wooden case some six feet high, with express 
labels pasted on it. Felix, uttering an unsteady 
laugh, inquired: 

“A fresh masterpiece for the Luxembourg Gal- 
lery?” 

“Unfortunately, no. A portrait I have been 
doing in the country.” 

Round the turn of the corridor, he snatched from 
his pocket the roll of banknotes. It amounted to a 
hundred and fifteen dollars. He went downtown 
as if walking on air. 

Besides, Pavin’s last words kept ringing in his 
ears. “A journey!” 

An escape! Another land! The beginning of a 
new life! It had come, then, at last — the golden 
opportunity. And, without troubling himself about 
the details of that transition, he was whirled away 
into the jewelled haze of Paris boulevards at night- 
fall, into the districts of cafes made famous by their 
patrons, where celebrities of all sorts congregated 
on plush-covered settees with their backs against a 


EMMA 


325 


wainscoting of mirrors, into the region of studios 
where, when the “ working light” was gone, geniuses, 
of whom posterity was destined to be proud, fore- 
gathered to display their nimble wit, their cynicism, 
their exceptional fervors. Then the sphere of Con- 
tinental drawing-rooms opened to his gaze: he 
recognized his youthfulness, believed again in his 
charm and talents, saw himself ultimately made 
free, through his accomplishments, of the society 
of elegant “ blue-stockings,” statesmen, diplomatists, 
and princesses. A cloud of unknown faces gathered 
on the margins of his dreams. He perceived, as it 
were, marble stairways lined with bowing servants, 
expanses of glistening parquetry over which rose- 
colored dresses floated, wide doorways filled with 
palms that masked musicians, conservatories where 
beautiful women, additionally distinguished by their 
love-affairs with the illustrious, leaned toward him 
amid masses of exotic flowers. Or else, he glimpsed 
lagoons in moonlight and a gondola gliding past the 
steps of an old palace, carved balconies hanging 
over an enchanted sea, a villa blushing, in sunset, 
amid trees that rose against an amber-colored sky, 
to burst, high overhead, into autumnal opulence, as 
does the foliage in a design by Fragonard. Those 
were all scenes of plenty, love, and fame, of unprec- 
edented adventures, of intermingling exaltations 
and languors, replete with the delights that fortune 
may secure for the character at once voluptuous and 
intellectual. And why should those visions not 
assume material shapes? Did not the whole world, 


3 2 6 


PREDESTINED 


after all, lie stretched out before youth made aware 
of its potentialities? 

Still, Emma’s face seemed to float constantly 
before him. He was enraged by the persistence of 
that apparition; and, as he had reached Fourteenth 
Street, to drown his scruples he entered Quilty’s 
saloon. 

But the floor covered with sawdust, the foil- 
wrapped chandeliers, the bar slopped over with 
beer, roused his disgust. He wondered how he 
could have spent so many hours in such a place. 

Nevertheless, he remained at the bar, drinking 
highballs, grumbling to himself at the quality of the 
whiskey, condescending, finally, with an inscrutable 
smile, to answer Quilty and an habitu6 of the resort, 
named Pandle — a rather obtrusively attired, dried-up, 
pessimistic-looking fellow apparently of unlimited 
leisure, who wore an auburn wig, and, since he 
was totally bereft of hair, affected two streaks of 
brown cosmetic in imitation of eyebrows. “What 
associates!” thought Felix. “What a den!” From 
that environment he could not, in contemplation, 
extricate the flat, or even Emma. All would have 
to be left behind. 

“As for her, did she expect to fasten herself for 
life to a man of his endowments? If he gave her 
the slip, she would not be a whit worse off than 
when he met her. It was the destiny of some to 
suffer in whatever situations they contrived. And 
did not the conqueror invariably have to drive his 
chariot to victory over prostrate bodies?” 


EMMA 


327 

On his way home, however, he modified his arro- 
gance. Dissimulation was imperative. 

Emma, who had been pressing her cheek against 
the window-pane, came forward with haggard eyes. 

“Your dinner’s spoiled hours ago. Where have 
you been?” 

“Collecting an old debt,” he answered, and threw 
fifty dollars upon the table. When she embraced 
him, her face radiant with relief and thankfulness, 
Felix grew sick at heart. Could he do this 
deed? 

Notwithstanding such thoughts, next day he went 
back to the Velasquez Building. “Monsieur Pavin 
was out.” 

“Ah!” 

He had given vent to an ejaculation of relief. It 
was a reaction. 

And a new struggle began. 

He haunted, the flat, followed Emma from one 
room to another, watched her at household tasks — 
striving to stamp upon his mind, so that he might 
not for one moment forget, the picture of her docile 
servitude. Sometimes, remaining perfectly still, he 
tried to imagine the place as it would be without him. 
Empty rooms, a vacant chair, the lonely bed, silence. 
But could he not hear, in imagination, her sobs, and 
the footfalls of furniture-movers? Her gaze rose to 
meet his; a look of wonder and inquiry trembled in 
her face; his eyes fell. He had the sensation of a 
man who, as his intended victim unexpectedly turns 
round, conceals a knife behind his back. 


328 


PREDESTINED 


It occurred to him that if he could feel a modicum 
of passion for her, his designs would never be accom- 
plished. So he urged himself to unprecedented 
exhibitions of tenderness: he made love to her, 
talked nonsense, kissed her eyelids, chin, and blue- 
black hair. In his anxiety to reproduce old ardors, 
he imitated all the blandishments that he had 
lavished on the others. He cried aloud, “I love 
you!” his heart crying, meanwhile, “If only I could 
be content to do so!” For when his lips met hers, 
he dreamed of princesses; and when he closed his 
eyes, he pondered “all that might be,” but for his 
conscience. He felt at the same time resentment 
toward Emma and an intense desire to be satisfied 
with her. He wished that he might be able willingly 
to sacrifice himself for her, and that she might then 
somehow set him free. 

To this sentimental pretence of Felix’s she made 
immediate response. Her large eyes once more 
grew lambent, her doting smiles returned, she re- 
gained her girlish airs. “It was like old times,” or 
else, “He had never been so nice.” When he was 
going out, she clung round his neck, or lured him 
back for another kiss. She could not let him leave 
her for an hour without participation in the most 
tender scene. On other occasions, her eyes chang- 
ing color in an instant, her amorous whispers ending 
in a catch, she barred his exit till he had sworn to 
his most trifling intention. He was going, usually, 
“to negotiate with certain publishers about a pros- 
pective book.” 


EMMA 


3 2 9 


After he had left the house, her words lingered in 
his ears, her dilated eyes seemed still to shine before 
him, and passing women who bore a vague resem- 
blance to her intruded on each guilty thought of 
his. 

Every day, he went half-way to Pavin’s studio, 
halted, and turned back. And it was as if he were 
relinquishing, in that retreat, a kingdom full of 
treasure. 

He came to the conclusion that before he could 
find a plausible excuse for leaving her, she would 
have to be drawn into a violent quarrel. “Insults 
cannot be forgotten; contempt in one will counter- 
act pity in the other; the irrevocable phrase, let 
slip in anger, may prove to be the passport to 
liberty.” But his attempts in that respect were all 
rendered half-hearted by his self-reproach. Besides, 
who could push an altercation with a woman dis- 
solved in tears? 

Fool that he had been, to forget her transforma- 
tion in jealousy! He had only to blurt out an 
allusion to some imaginary woman, create a false 
impression, excite Emma till she threatened him 
ferociously, or, still better, attacked him. In the 
letter left behind him, this sentence would appear, 
“From what has just occurred, you, too, can measure 
not only the unhappiness, but also the danger, of 
our companionship.” 

Thirteen days had passed since Pavin’s proposal, 
when Felix, ready for anything, appeared again at 
the Velasquez Building. 


33 ° 


PREDESTINED 


“Monsieur Pavin? Why, sir, he sailed yesterday 
for Europe.” 

Gone, before the appointed day, without a word! 

The mirage vanished; the desert stretched to the 
horizon its monotonous and barren undulations. 

He settled down to write short stories “such as 
magazine editors want.” Humbly he rummaged 
current periodicals for models. On some of those 
pages, Miss Nuncheon displayed her theories about 
“the smart set,” and in every number of The Mauve 
Monthly Mr. Lute voiced no less glibly in sonnets 
than in quatrains some enigmatical and pallid yearn- 
ings. Felix, for all his sneers, could not string 
together half a dozen satisfactory paragraphs. 

He went downtown to hunt a job among the 
newspaper offices. The first refusal disheartened 
him. As he was leaving that vicinity, Johnny Livy 
passed, whistling, almost stout in a new plaid ulster. 

Felix finished Pavin ’s loan, and sold his old pawn- 
tickets. Emma was using her patrimony. Bill- 
collectors called daily. 

Every night, he stayed late at Quilty’s bar. Fre- 
quently, in the morning he had no recollection of 
coming home. On rising, he was good for nothing 
till he had swallowed a drink of brandy. 

It was his “one refuge,” that state of inebriety, 
in which all his regrets and anxieties melted quite 
away; in which a conviction of absolute well-being 
came to him; in which, as he advanced to an oblitera- 
tion of all objective consciousness, veil after veil was 
lifted from his subjective mind, until, like a mystic 


EMMA 


33i 


seemingly on the verge of discovering the undiscover- 
able, he was stirred, so to speak, by revelations, 
vaguely splendid, concerning a government whose 
province was the illimitable field of stars. His 
soul, taking flight, reached spaces where the mun- 
dane and temporal was lost in the celestial and 
eternal, where the human sojourn became trivial, 
where the air trembled with a harmony of promises 
to be fulfilled in perpetuity. It was, indeed, at 
such moments that his spirit, escaping from the 
flesh, soared to its only presumption of a God. 
But at his every return to sobriety the sense of truth 
departed from those phantasms, the veils descended, 
as if his ethereal part, having mingled with infinitude, 
had to be deprived of its discoveries at re-entry into 
the body. Moreover, there were no terms whereby 
he could have described intelligibly his fragmentary 
reminiscences. 

Yet he now found those periods the only desir- 
able ones in life. Without any more self-condemna- 
tion, he clung to his habit, because indulgence of it 
made him oblivious to its consequences. 

His constant intemperance, his relapse — since 
Pavin’s departure — into his former sullenness, his 
failure to renew by any remunerative deed Emma’s 
faith in him, evidently forced his wife, at last, to the 
conclusion that the future held more clouds than 
sunshine. She no longer had the courage to talk of 
celebrity and wealth to come. Her attitudes of 
adoration ceased before the reiterated spectacle of a 
man made unsteady and fatuous by drink. And, in 


332 


PREDESTINED 


her apprehensions, every day expressed with greater 
freedom were mixed up reproaches about “ poverty, ” 
bald comparisons of Felix’s debauchery to Lew’s, 
dire predictions, wails of self-pity, and accusations 
that he was deliberately going downhill “because he 
and some girl uptown had fallen out.” 

Nightly he had to hear her, in a voice monoto- 
nously shrill, rehearse her wrongs. The list of his 
offences was apparently limitless: he wondered, 
occasionally, if she kept a memorandum-book in 
which to note the most trifling reprehensible act of 
his. Even Pat, who crept to his master’s side while 
these diatribes were in progress, drooped his head 
and yawned. When she had finished, Felix was apt 
to say: 

“After all, your precious Lew was a sensible 
man, who knew what he was about.” 

Once, she retorted: 

“No doubt you’d like to be rid of me, too! Or 
even see me die!” 

He made no response. But he sent at her, from 
beneath his lowered eyelids, a furtive look of hatred. 

Emma, though apparently engaged in dusting the 
bisque statuette of an infant, was watching Felix in 
the mirror above the mantel-shelf. She planted 
herself before him, with arms akimbo. 

“You’ll never get off so easy!” 

But, unexpectedly, a look of hopelessness ap- 
peared upon her face. Her eyes rolled in their 
sockets. Her mouth was slowly distorted, as are 
children’s mouths just before a fit of grief. She left 


EMMA 


333 


the room, and threw herself face-downward upon 
the bed. Her lamentations filled the house. Fi- 
nally / she was prostrated, without sufficient strength 
to reach for the headache powders in the bureau 
drawer. 

One evening, Felix was leaving the flathouse when 
a mail-carrier, in his gray uniform and with his bag 
of tan sole-leather slung over one shoulder, slipped 
into the metal letter-box an envelope of unusual ap- 
pearance. It was from France — from Paul Pavin. 
A sneer curled the young man’s lip; he thrust the 
missive unopened into his pocket. 

“So he recalled the fact that there was a little 
something to explain?” 

When, in Quilty’s saloon, he had fortified himself 
with a drink of whiskey, Felix tore open the en- 
velope. The words caught his eye: 

“I first wrote to you in care of The Evening 
Sphere. Then, as there was no time to lose, I tele- 
phoned to the editor for your address. I sent a 
note, by special delivery, to your house, and, at 
the last moment, another, by messenger. Both 
were evidently accepted. . . 

It was Emma who had intercepted them! Then 
she knew everything? But that was impossible. 
All the same, there was no other explanation. His 
hands shook so violently that the note-paper rattled. 

“This fills my score against her!” 

And he prepared for his arraignment of her by 
getting thoroughly drunk. Toward nine o’clock, 
he forgot that he had a wife. 


334 


PREDESTINED 


Presently, he became aware that some one was 
talking to him. Directly before his face, an incom- 
plete countenance was resolved out of a mist: he 
recognized Quilty by the scar across his cheek-bone. 

“ A lady in the back room wants a word with you.” 

“A lady?” 

With a vacant laugh, Felix entered the compart- 
ment at the rear of the saloon. 

Some women, of a foreign appearance, their hats 
ornamented with draggled plumes, their large, flat 
hand-bags laid on bare table-tops among half-empty 
glasses, sat here and there in the relaxed attitudes of 
tired pedestrians. All were staring, with expres- 
sions of antagonism, at a tense figure posted, bolt 
upright, by the corridor door. It was Emma. 

“You! In this place!” 

Without replying, her face colorless, her eyes 
enormous, her lips compressed as if to keep in a 
cry, she pounced upon him and dragged him, through 
the corridor, into the street. 

There, he struggled to release himself. But she, 
panting, clung to him with both hands. 

“What are you trying to do!” 

“ You’re coming home with me.” 

“I, after the way you’ve just humiliated me?” 

“Humiliated you! Oh! Oh!” 

He jerked himself loose, and reeled against the 
wall. But immediately, she fastened on him again. 
He was as much taken aback by her strength as by 
her courage. She seemed strange to him. 

“Will you come home?” 


EMMA 


335 


“No!” 

“But you will! You will, do you hear? You 
don’t know me yet! I’ll follow you everywhere! 
I’ll cry out to every one how you treat me!” 

Under the electric signs, a ring of faces swiftly 
took shape round them. Before the saloon door- 
way appeared Mr. Pandle, jauntily bewigged, his 
imitation eyebrows raised. And, all the while, 
Emma’s voice, pitched in a strident key, proclaimed 
that she was Felix’s wife, upbraided him for his 
neglect of her, paraded before the throng of spec- 
tators the secrets of his life. In short, there gushed 
from her lips pell-mell, like a torrent from a broken 
dam, all her accumulated grievances. 

But she stopped short, and stared, aghast, at the 
hand with which he was distractedly straightening 
his cravat. 

“The diamond ring! My ring!” 

As a matter of fact, he had pawned it that very 
evening. 

Propelled by shame, he thrust the spectators aside, 
and set out rapidly toward Second Avenue. She ran 
after him, again seized upon his arm, and, suiting 
her steps to his long strides, let him feel the full 
weight of her unavoidable person. From time to 
time, she uttered an incoherent gasp of menace. 

The parlor of the flat enclosed him. His counter- 
action began: 

“I might have expected it. Inborn vulgarity 
can’t be concealed for long!” 

Wait, did he not have a better attack than that 


PREDESTINED 


336 

“up his sleeve”? Ah, Pavin’s letter! Snatching 
it from his pocket, he shook it under her nose. 

“Kindly explain what became of the three mes- 
sages from my friend? Thanks to this one, which 
you weren’t able to intercept, I know everything.” 

“Then you need no explanations.” 

“What,” he shouted, “you confess to taking 
them?” 

“And if I did? I felt in my bones that something 
was going on. Then those letters, written in French 
— so much caution! Oh, a woman can tell! Why, 
they seemed to burn my fingers! Yes, I kept them! 
And if they spoiled any of your wicked tricks, I’m 
doubly glad!” 

He experienced, simultaneously with a hot thrill 
in the solar plexus, the necessity of destroying 
something. He was on the point of springing at 
her, when the bisque infant, crawling on the mantel- 
shelf, attracted his attention. He whirled the orna- 
ment above his head, then dashed it into a thousand 
pieces at her feet. 

A scream reverberated. She precipitated herself 
upon the fragments of that symbol. 

“Oh, you devil! I hate you! I hate you!” 

“That is what I have been waiting to hear you 
say,” he answered. And, with his dog, he went out, 
expecting never to return. 

Thanks to the diamond ring, he had more than a 
hundred dollars in his pocket. At Union Square, 
he threw himself into a public automobile, with the 
command, “Drive up Broadway.” Soon the glitter 


EMMA 


337 

ing fronts of theatres and night restaurants were 
streaming past him. 

With Pat at his heels, he entered cafes decorated 
in gilt and scarlet, where marble columns ended in 
Corinthian capitals, and, behind expanses of ma- 
hogany, were displayed mural decorations of his- 
toric and allegorical import. The round tables 
with carved legs, the waiters in their long aprons, 
the men in evening dress who crowded through the 
doorways during the intermissions of theatrical 
performances going on near by, were, for Felix, like 
fragments in a vision of the past. He wondered if he 
was going to be confronted by Noon. But after he 
had made the rounds of half a dozen cafes, he gave 
up trying to distinguish the faces of his neighbors. 

An incessant restlessness urged him from one spot 
to another. No sooner had he comprehended a 
group of strangers admiring the bull-terrier, than 
he was elsewhere, conversing with a bartender who, 
to his extreme self-complacency, remembered his 
name. “But I must go .” “Without finishing your 
drink?” “That’s so!” He gulped down his high- 
ball with the air of one who has committed an 
almost unpardonable offence. 

What was this place? A gloomy side street, a 
baroque facade, a familiar doorway. It was the 
stage entrance of the Trocadero Theatre. 

Inside, the doorkeeper, before darkening the vesti- 
bule, was taking a last look at his features in a 
cracked mirror. He turned round. The protuber- 
ance on his nose had grown to the size of a walnut. 


33 ^ 


PREDESTINED 


“Well, what do you want!” 

“Miss Sinjon?” Felix inquired, mechanically. 

“She left here half an hour ago.” 

He had a spasm of alarm. Where was she ? He 
hailed a hansom cab: then, with his foot on the 
cab step, he paused. 

“Why, for the moment time had turned back, on 
its course, a year and more!” 

He stumbled off toward Broadway, pursued by 
the sarcasms of the cab-driver. 

And the lights, enlarged, melting together, form- 
ing on all sides an uninterrupted radiance, engulfed 
him, like a shining sea. He was borne hither and 
thither by chance contacts. Doors yawned before 
him: he drifted into places where electric globes 
rotated overhead, and the floors seemed furnished 
with inequalities. He rested his elbows on tables 
that he did not see, gazed at the necks of champagne 
bottles, received on his back the slaps of invisible 
persons, and in his ears the monotonous assurance 
that he was “a good fellow.” Strains of music stole 
upon his senses; he burst into tears. He had an 
altercation with a man concerning the bull-terrier; 
when he tried to catch his opponent by the throat, 
a score of intermediaries suddenly swarmed round 
him. On a lonely street corner, he discovered that 
he had lost his overcoat. He walked straight ahead, 
but the same buildings appeared to follow him every- 
where. Their foundations were shadowy, their up- 
per stories were gray. It was the dawn. 

Late that afternoon, an excruciating headache 


EMMA 


339 


roused Felix from a troubled sleep. He was lying, 
fully dressed, on the counterpane in a wretched 
hotel bedroom. Pat, perched on the edge of a 
washstand, was whining at the dry faucets. 

Felix, however, knew better than to slake his own 
thirst with water. Dragging himself to the tele- 
phone, he ordered brandy, and victuals for the dog. 
On paying the waiter, he found that he had three 
dollars left. 

But nausea seized him. He lay down quickly, 
and strove to collect his thoughts. What had hap- 
pened ? 

At full recollection of the previous night’s events, 
remorse completed his distress. He shrank back 
as if from the tacit condemnation of a multitude of 
unseen witnesses. 

What if her despair had resulted in a dangerous 
illness? What if she had done herself some harm? 
Such thoughts brought him to his feet. 

While trying to arrange his clothes, he was forced 
to pause, from time to time, with both hands on 
the bedpost, until his qualms had passed. His 
linen was soiled, his trousers were wrinkled, his 
shoes were covered with mud; but he had to go 
out thus disordered, unshaven, with drawn and 
yellowish visage. 

It was already evening. Flurries of snow ap- 
peared above a confusion of glistening umbrellas. 

The pavement, wet and black, seemed so nearly 
liquid that he hesitated to set one foot before the 
other. He kept close to the walls for fear that 


340 


PREDESTINED 


passing trolley-cars “might run up on the sidewalk.” 
He took fright midway of street crossings, dodged 
at a sound of hoofs, and, with perspiration rolling 
down his cheeks, wished at the same instant to run 
forward and to lie down. He got into a cab, but 
the jolting of that vehicle over car tracks was intol- 
erable. He pressed on afoot. The street lights 
danced before him; and the roofs of tall buildings, 
indistinct above a whirl of snowflakes, seemed to be 
gradually toppling forward. 

At Union Square, he hesitated. What was he 
going to find at home ? When he proceeded, it was 
by a devious way, so that he might avoid as long 
as possible a fulfillment of his premonitions. 

Finally, he traversed Thirteenth Street. Between 
Third and Second Avenues, where some shabby- 
genteel lodging-houses displayed, behind the falling 
snow, their crumbling stonework and cast-iron bal- 
conies made frail by rust, two women were con- 
versing on a doorstep. One was a bareheaded, un- 
symmetrical creature arrayed in a wrapper, with an 
aureole of dishevelled hair. The other was Miss 
Qewan. 

Felix, in the attitude of a malefactor threatened with 
detection, slipped past the ex-chorus girl unseen. 

Second Avenue opened out before him. Yes, the 
flathouse stood there still, unchanged in any part. 
Almost reassured, he crossed the street. 

At the head of the staircase, a white-robed figure 
was awaiting him. Emma stretched out her hands. 
He caught her to his breast. 


EMMA 


341 


“Oh, you’ve come back!” 

And, for that magnanimity, she forgave him every- 
thing. 

In the parlor, she sank into a chair: he knelt 
beside her. They gazed at each other with the 
blank looks of persons who have passed through a 
prolonged mutual agony. He observed all the 
ravages of grief in her white face. In a night, she 
had aged ten years. 

Clad in a dressing-sack and a petticoat, she had 
remained, since dawn, at the front windows. 

“And you, too, have been punished,” she faltered, 
passing her fingers timidly through his hair. “But 
I? Oh, how cruel you were! How you’ve made 
me suffer!” Letting her head fall back, staring, 
wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the ceiling, she 
recalled that suffering of hers — she described, with 
painful exactitude, her every pang. 

Sobs issued from his throat. 

“May I be struck dead if I ever speak an unkind 
word to you again! A new life begins for us to- 
night. Will you believe that, Emma?” 

“Yes, yes; I’ll try to believe you now.” 

But, of a sudden, she grew faint, and pressed 
her palms against her brow. “Her headache was 
more than she could bear.” 

“Have you taken anything for it?” 

“It did no good. But get me a powder, any- 
way.” 

He put her to bed. Lying on her back, she 
moved her head from side to side. When a half 


342 


PREDESTINED 


hour had elapsed, she asked, in querulous, thin 
tones, for another headache powder. This she 
took, and, presently, was still. Felix, stretched 
beside her, fell asleep. 

He was awakened by the clink of a glass tumbler. 

“Emma?” 

“I can’t stand this pain.” 

“You mustn’t take so much of that stuff. It’s a 
dangerous depressant.” 

“I know.” 

Again he drifted into slumber. 

But some one was calling him from a great dis- 
tance. He sat up in bed, just as the clock struck 
two. 

“Felix! Felix!” 

It was Emma’s voice, hardly audible. 

He sprang up, lighted the gas, and bent over her. 
Her head was thrown back; her face and mouth 
had a bluish tinge ; her skin was glazed with moist- 
ure. From between her parted lips came short, 
quick gasps. 

“I feel so queer, so weak — my heart ” 

Felix groped her pulse, which was small, soft, 
and nearly imperceptible. Her eyes — the pupils 
extraordinarily dilated — rolling very slowly toward 
him, denoted terror. 

“Do something! Help me!” 

He ran into the dining-room, returned with a 
bottle of brandy, held half a glassful to her lips. 
But the liquor ran down her chin, as she turned 
away her face, moaning, “Not that!” 


EMMA 


343 


He rushed into the public hallway, shouted, got no 
response. He dashed to a front window. The cold 
air blew into the parlor. 

Second Avenue was white with snow; the atmos- 
phere, however, was clear; and a pale lavender 
diffusion from the arc lamps on their tall metal 
poles was more serene and pure than moonlight. 
A man in a thin jacket was standing on the oppo- 
site corner. 

“Get me a doctor, quick!” 

The fellow looked up, hesitated, then set off, at 
full speed, toward Fourteenth Street. Felix re- 
turned to Emma. 

The bluish hue had deepened in her face; her lips 
were violet-colored; the eyes, never before so large 
and black-looking, stared straight upward. Every 
moment, her head left the pillow, and her mouth, at 
the same time reaching out for air, imitated the 
spasmodic respiratory efforts of a fish drawn from 
its element. 

Through the crack below the tilted mirror of the 
bureau, Lew watched this struggle. 

Felix gathered her into his arms. So much to ask 
pardon for, so much to expiate, and no words pro- 
ducible except the hoarse protest: 

“No! No! No!” 

A look of recognition flickered into her eyes. 
With difficulty she achieved the speech: 

“I’ve been a good wife — the sisters— a priest ” 

She tried to gain back the breath that she had lost. 
She grew limp; the pupils disappeared beneath her 


344 


PREDESTINED 


lashes; after each gasp her mouth remained the 
longer open. But the almost inapprehensible utter- 
ance stole forth: 

“You’ll go back, now” .... 

Later, in a murmur so tenuous that it seemed 
less like a vocal expression than a thought intui- 
tively understood: 

“You’ll be famous. . . . You’ll love other 

women” .... 

Her mouth did not close again. He touched her 
wrist, and could not feel a pulse. 

And he was invaded by a vast incredulity. 

Two days after, on the thirtieth of March, she 
was buried in a Brooklyn cemetery. The last of her 
patrimony paid for a plot of ground — of minimum 
size — for the undertaker’s services, and for the 
mass, that she would have desired, in a Roman 
Catholic church near by. 

From the church door, the hearse was followed 
by one carriage, containing Felix and Pat. At the 
cemetery gate, the undertaker got down nimbly 
from beside the driver of the hearse, and, with 
three assistants all in suits of rusty black, bore the 
coffin, covered with white roses, its six silver-plated 
handles flashing, to the grave. There, it was en- 
closed in a pine box, and lowered, by means of ropes, 
into the pit. Two rough-looking fellows, armed 
with spades, turned sheepishly to Felix. 

His lips trembled; he designated the undertaker. 

“Go to work, boys,” that functionary ordered, 
softly, with an apologetic cough. 


EMMA 


345 

A rhythmic rattling began. The grave was filled 
with earth. 

Felix walked back heavily amid mounds and 
tombstones. In the distance, men and women 
were moving slowly, sometimes stooping, with a 
lingering gesture, to lay a blossom on a grave, some- 
times standing, in lax attitudes of melancholy con- 
templation, before a sculptured monument. The 
ground, covered with last year’s grass, bore patches 
of melting snow. Here and there, appeared wreaths 
and memorial devices, shrivelled and sodden, the 
rusty wires of their frameworks protruding through 
discolored rubbish. Brilliant sunlight shone on this 
deterioration and decay of things which had been 
fresh, blooming, and alive. 

The same sunlight, penetrating the flat in Second 
Avenue, glinted on the backs of the hand-painted 
chairs, on the dozen photographs of Emma in her 
finery of other days, on the foot of the brass bed- 
stead. 

There Felix stood motionless, listening. But no* 
sound reached him from the kitchen. 

He fell upon his knees. 

“Oh, Pat, that poor little thing! That poor little 
thing!” 




































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• A 




PART FOUR 

NINA 










CHAPTER XVI 


Anxious to escape at once from that environment, 
he sent for an auctioneer, who asked: 

“Do you want a public sale?” 

Felix recoiled from the thought of strangers 
tramping through her home. The auctioneer, ac- 
cordingly, explored the rooms, appraised each arti- 
cle, and, after letting fall some words about “hard 
times” and “the scarcity of cash,” offered the young 
man seventy-five dollars down for everything. Felix 
made a gesture of resignation. The other, looking 
surprised and discomfited, went off for his porters. 

They stripped the flat. The bare aspect of the 
parlor recalled to Felix the day when he and she 
had come house-hunting. Just so others would 
come now. It seemed to him that the little, garish 
room ought to express, somehow, in perpetuity, the 
tragedy it had enclosed. And yet, the next tenants 
would never see, as he did whenever he turned 
round, a chimera dissolving in the shadows. 

Now it took shape beyond a succession of open 
doors, in the kitchen; again, from the kitchen he 
saw it float before a parlor window. Lacking out- 
line and substance, vaguer than any apparition of 
conventional report, less like a wraith, indeed, than 
a mere fall of shade at the passage of a cloud before 

349 


35 ° 


PREDESTINED 


the sun, it was, for Felix, indefinitely suggestive of 
her person — as if one had there some unfathomable 
analogy to the echo, lingering after the voice has 
died away. But when, taking his departure in the 
twilight, he laid hand upon the door-knob, did she 
not stand there, barring his exit in a well-remembered 
pose, her large eyes peering up at him, as who 
should say, in apprehension, “Where to?” 

The snow had melted from the streets ; the breeze 
was temperate: Spring seemed to have drawn near 
under cover of recent storms, now, with her immi- 
nence, to surprise the city weary of its winter. Soon, 
in the parks, the trees would weave their pale green 
webs above the tulip beds, bright song-birds would 
sail down adventuring, and the fragrance of mag- 
nolia and hawthorn blooms would cause the eyes of 
lovers to turn wistfully toward incompletely foliated 
bowers. Felix recalled a speech of Emma’s, “When 
spring comes, I want to fly away, to some place far 
off, where I have never been.” 

Returning to the cemetery, he saw the marble 
headstone set in place, and strewed fresh blossoms 
on the grave. But, despite his previous materialistic 
theories, he felt she was not there. Such cares soon 
appeared as futile, as those of a devotee who tends a 
spot sanctified merely by tradition, where nothing 
has ever happened, or will happen. So, presently, 
he found himself thinking of her as translated to 
some region beyond the sunset or amid the stars; 
and the offerings that he made to her thereafter were 
of contrition and belated tenderness. He pored 


NINA 


351 


over the dozen photographs of Emma, prim in her 
various provincial-looking gala costumes: and the 
details in each portrait which, once on a time, had 
amused him, at last brought moisture to his eyes. 
He packed those souvenirs away; he could not bear 
them round him in his new lodgings. 

Miss Qewan, meeting him one day in Union 
Square, had made bold to recommend the boarding- 
house where she was living. Situated on Thirteenth 
Street, between Second and Third Avenues, it was 
the dwelling where he had seen her standing on the 
doorstep. 

The brown-stone front, four stories high, was 
scaling off in patches; the shutters, all askew, were 
losing their green paint. Draggled lace curtains 
hung in the lower windows; and the weather was 
not yet warm enough for the upper sills to lack their 
rows of milk bottles. The front door, raised three 
steps above the pavement, in a small vestibule, and 
surmounted by a rickety iron balcony, was so nar- 
row as to make one wonder how the landlady, loom- 
ing in the hallway, got out and in. 

Mrs. Snatt was a worried-looking woman, clad in a 
loose wrapper, thin in the face but elsewhere corpu- 
lent, with a mop of almost colorless hair, and indis- 
tinct eyes and lips. Formerly a theatrical costumer, 
she had married, “when old enough to know better,” 
a musician. Her husband running through her 
savings and confronting her with the necessity of 
bringing up some children, Mrs. Snatt had opened 
a house of board and lodging for “the profession.” 


35 2 


PREDESTINED 


Still, as she informed Felix in her most elegant 
manner, on seeing him she knew of no reason for 
drawing the line at the footlights. 

By a “ singular coincidence,” the “ second floor 
back” was unoccupied. Felix contemplated apa- 
thetically a square apartment, with a faded ingrain 
carpet considerably stained round the washstand, a 
folding-bed that imitated by day a chest of drawers, 
a bureau with initials scratched on the mirror, and 
some spring-seated chairs from which the padding 
was nearly gone. A what-not of ebony, originally 
supported by three legs, leaned in a corner, and bore 
on its top shelf the tinted clay figure of a matador 
who lacked a nose. The pallid walls, with some 
vertical, brownish streaks on them, were set off by 
two or three oil paintings that Mrs. Snatt had seen, 
with her own eyes, done “by hand,” in the window 
of a shop where soap wrappers were exchanged for 
premiums. 

The apartment overlooked the rear walls of 
buildings fronting on Fourteenth Street. Below, 
the yards, their board fences crumbling from the 
top, displayed their kitchen entries, garbage pails, 
and rubbish heaps. In some, old mattresses lay 
doubled up in puddles; the relics of chairs and sofas 
were sinking to the ground, battered bird-cages, 
stoves without feet, and broken bottles were piled 
up in masses, while here and there, over the debris, 
some fathoms of rusty wire spread large, erratic 
coils and angles, like the flamboyant signature 
of ruin. Along the fences, cats, flat as lathes, their 


NINA 353 

shoulder bones accentuated, paced with a suave and 
furtive gait. 

A bath adjoined the apartment; and if one de- 
sired only a light breakfast served in the room, 
the price would be six dollars a week. 

Felix shrugged his shoulders. It would do till 
he “got upon his feet.” 

He removed the oil paintings and the clay matador, 
unpacked his books, set his mother’s photograph 
upon the bureau. He repented having disposed of 
all Emma’s furnishings. His dissatisfaction was 
not reduced when he found in the closet an old 
copy of The Open Air Magazine. It contained a 
picture of “Mr. Mortimer Fray’s new country 
house” — an excellent specimen of Tudor archi- 
tecture in brick, with lawns, some groups of clipped 
box-trees, a fish-pond lined with stone, and, in the 
foreground, a Russian wolfhound couchant beside 
a sun-dial. 

But, to his surprise, he could not conjure up his 
old rage against the man. Other humiliations had 
intervened; and animosity against a single object 
had given place to a general rancor, because of its 
diffusion at once vaguer and more bitter. He 
wished nothing, now, of Fray except that the latter 
should never learn of this deterioration. 

It was a house of slamming doors, of shrill out- 
cries, of shaking chandeliers, and a monotonous 
booming of bass voices engaged, apparently, in his- 
trionic declamation. Strong odors of fried bacon, 
of onions, and of cabbage were wafted up the nar- 


354 


PREDESTINED 


row staircase; and one could not issue into the 
corridors without smelling cigarette smoke and 
cologne. 

At night, he sometimes woke with a start, under 
the impression that the ceiling was coming down. 
This rumpus, he learned, was created by some 
acrobats who roomed above him, and whose artistic 
fervor drove them out of bed, apparently, from 
time to time — perhaps to practise feats which had 
occurred to them at that moment, between waking 
and sleeping, when so many seemingly brilliant 
thoughts flash through the brain. 

Every morning, before Felix was ready to arise, a 
clatter of pianos began up and down the block. 
Then one heard “the latest popular airs” repeated 
a hundred times, the interminable scales of aspirants 
for concert honors, the shout of hopeful barytones, 
and the guffaw that punctuated the low comedian’s 
song. It became a competition, that uproar. Felix, 
with an oath, got up and rang the bell. 

His breakfast was brought upstairs by the ser- 
vant, an angular drudge named Delia, with big 
feet in broken shoes, and displaying, under frowzy 
hair, a pair of dull eyes and a patient smile. 

She stood at the foot of the bed, twisting up a 
spotted apron in hands that appeared already to 
have sifted tons of ashes, scrubbed acres of floors, 
and washed a myriad greasy pans: and with one 
foot advanced toward the door, and her body half 
turned, she seemed continually ready to take flight. 
When she had recovered somewhat from her em- 


NINA 


355 

barrassment before “so fine a gentleman,” Delia 
enlightened Mr. Piers about his neighbors. 

In the “ground floor front,” a female, seldom 
seen, sat all day in a darkened room, behind a 
crystal ball, professing to bring back sweethearts 
grown indifferent, to restore lost articles, and to 
disclose the name of “the other woman.” The rear 
was occupied by Mrs. Snatt and her three small 
children, of whose presence below Felix needed no 
announcement, since he heard them, at all hours, 
whining, bawling, and being spanked. Occasion- 
ally, he saw them in the back yard, wandering over 
an oblong plat of barren earth, beneath a net-work 
of clothes lines. The boy was a stupid-looking 
child with too large a head and spasmodic gestures. 
The little girl, pale and languid, walked unsteadily. 
Mrs. Snatt’s third offspring, a babe in arms, of 
indeterminable sex, seemed, on the contrary, to 
judge from the redness of its face and the power of 
its lungs, excessively robust. Mr. Snatt was not at 
home. One gathered, from Delia, that the only 
time he gave his family this treat was when his 
wife had more than “cleared expenses.” 

On the second floor, directly in front of Felix’s 
apartment, dwelt a theatrical couple somewhat ad- 
vanced in years, known to the public as “The 
Delaclaires, King and Queen of Polite Vaudeville.” 
Their son — a youth who, according to Delia, “wasn’t 
much” — slept in the adjacent hall bedroom. 

The upper regions were inhabited by various 
actors and actresses. Sometimes Felix encountered 


PREDESTINED 


356 

on the stairs a short, thin-faced damsel, always 
attired in the most girlish hats and dresses, a psyche- 
knot of straw-colored hair protruding backward 
six inches from her neck. She left behind her a trail 
of perfume of that sort which causes persons in 
the street to stop and look round in astonishment. 

Miss Qewan also lived overhead; and Felix, one 
day meeting her in the vestibule, was curious to 
know why she had chosen this abode. 

She assured him that when he knew the habits and 
ambitions of the other lodgers, he would change his 
mind about them. 

“And yet you’ve not gone back to the chorus?” 

“That’s different.” 

She was now cashier in a restaurant on lower 
Broadway. This position she had obtained through 
the friendly offices of the “right sort of man” — a 
disinterested benefactor. 

“He’s a saloon keeper. But not what you’d 
expect.” 

“I know some excellent saloon keepers,” Felix 
made haste to assure her. But she gave him a sad 
look that put him out of countenance. 

“And you, I suppose, are writing?” 

He responded, with a mirthless laugh : 

“As you can see, I’ve found literature a poor crutch.” 

Nevertheless, next day he had a stroke of luck. 
He was accepted provisionally as a reporter on The 
Torch , an evening newspaper of revolutionary ten- 
dencies and a large circulation, published on Park 
Row. His salary was fixed at twenty dollars a week. 


NINA 


357 


He breathed again the air smelling of printer’s ink, 
paper, pipe smoke, and dusty floors; he was sur- 
rounded by a familiar clatter; he experienced the 
ennui that had beset him in the office of The Evening 
Sphere. But the two newspapers were intrinsically 
dissimilar. 

In the pages of The Torch , accuracy was a neg- 
ligible quality; mendacity which produced a thrill 
was an accomplishment; trivial facts were inflated 
recklessly by fancy in order that headlines a foot 
deep might shock the general eye; and, to excite 
the emotionalism of the masses, the part of criminals 
was taken in murder trials, the rich were crudely 
caricatured for their wealth and, at the same time, 
remarked obsequiously for their expensive entertain- 
ments, while the editorial articles, reduced to the 
simplest terms, bristled with praises of “the common 
people,” and abuse of “moneyed tyrants.” The 
reporters held their breath when the great man who 
wrote these essays, on a salary of thirty thousand 
dollars a year, stalked, with impassive visage, to his 
automobile. 

After work, the young man stopped at the board- 
ing-house for the bull- terrier, which the servant, from 
admiration of Felix, had been stuffing with scraps 
of food all day. In a restaurant on West Four- 
teenth Street he dined for a half dollar. After- 
ward, he entered Quilty’s saloon. 

For a while, he had remained away from this 
resort through delicacy. But other places in that 
neighborhood were not the same : and he had 


PREDESTINED 


358 

argued that, after all, the living were exculpated for 
indulging even in bereavement their habitual appe- 
tites. It was invariably with a faint tremor of 
anticipation that he glimpsed the bar, the mirrors, 
the pyramids of glasses which the bartender was 
always polishing and rearranging — a task never 
finished. 

There, business was good. Situated on a thor- 
oughfare where many cheap concert halls lured from 
surrounding districts crowds of humble pleasure- 
seekers, the dram shop caught every day new cus- 
tomers, youthful, vigorous, settled in employment, 
promising protracted patronage. As a result, Mr. 
Quilty was not troubled by the bugbear of saloon 
keepers operating in less populous regions — by the 
apprehension, namely, that incipient drinkers would 
not, sufficiently for continued profit, replace the 
worn out and bankrupt. 

Clean shaven, carefully dressed, showing a gold 
watch chain and the emblem of a benevolent society, 
he received graciously, in his place between the 
cashier’s desk and the cigar stand, the respectful 
salutations of the immature, and the trite flippancy 
of the middle-aged. Sometimes, closing the back 
room to feminine trade, he retired with corpulent, 
ruddy Irishmen in fancy waistcoats, to concoct 
stratagems,, against constrictive legislation, of which 
mere customers could only guess the brilliancy. 
But despite his political importance, Mr. Quilty 
never failed to pass the time of day with Felix, 
whom he approached with an air at once propitiating 


NINA 


359 


and self-conscious. At times, he referred to his 
daughters. They ought to learn French and music? 
He understood that there was a school in Connecti- 
cut where young ladies were taught everything 
fashionable — even the proper way to enter a car- 
riage. His apparent idea was to remove his children 
ultimately from all associations that could readily 
recall their origin. Meanwhile, they ought to have 
some one in the position of a mother. And the saloon 
keeper, after looking at Felix vacantly, remarked: 

“I hear you’re boarding at Mrs. Snatt’s?” A 
lady had told him so. 

“Miss Qewan,” ejaculated Felix. “Why, then 
you must be ” 

A blush brought into prominence Mr. Quilty’s 
scar. He made haste to explain that friendship. 

He had seen her grow up on the “East Side,” the 
reputable daughter of a policeman. Left an orphan 
while in her teens, she had suffered, as a result of 
too much trustfulness, in a familiar manner. From 
that time, life had been an uphill road for her. 
Quilty, meeting her recently, had obtained for her 
the position in a Broadway restaurant. 

“And, mind ye, as good a woman as you’ll find 
anywheres!” 

“Moreover, deserving of something better,” Felix 
assented, heartily. 

Quilty rubbed his chin, and looked uncomfortable. 

He was relieved by the appearance of a fat, good- 
natured fellow of fOrty-five, in a baggy sack suit, 
with a large mustache, and slightly protruding eyes. 


36 ° 


PREDESTINED 


“Mr. Piers, shake hands with my brother-in-law, 
Mr. Connla.” 

The stranger stared intently at Felix, suppressed 
a grin, and inquired of his relative, in a gruff voice: 

“Where’s Pandle?” 

The bewigged habitue, of mysterious occupation, 
was not there. Quilty, with an expression of dis- 
gust, exclaimed: 

“Has he been working again!” 

“That’s a question. I’ll hunt him; but you 
warn him meantime, d’ye see, for I’ve nothing 
against him personally.” Then, turning to the 
young man, with a twinkling eye, 

“You’ll not remember me?” 

He identified himself as the detective who had 
rescued Felix, one night, from some negroes. 

“And that was a good bull-terrier, too! Have you 
got him yet?” 

Felix whistled to Pat, who was standing on his 
hind legs before the “free lunch” buffet. The 
detective, squatting down, made friends with the 
dog at once. 

But he declared that the beast was too fat, that 
he was “losing his lines.” Felix had to admit the 
justice of this criticism. Pat got too much food 
and not enough exercise; so that his neck and body 
were becoming heavy, while his white head, covered 
with the pink scars of many battles, was taking on 
that swollen, battered look noticeable in good dogs 
permitted to “run to seed.” 

“He’s been neglected, that terrier,” was the 


NINA 


361 

detective’s blunt comment. “He’s done too much 
time loafing in kitchens and looking at ugly people. 
Faith, it’s the truth — a dog gets to look like the 
place he’s in, as a man does, too. He needs, now, 
exercise, and handsome faces round him. Leave 
me have him on Sundays: . I’ll take him for a twelve 
mile walk into the counthry, and he’ll get both his 
requirements at once.” 

On several occasions, the detective returned to 
the saloon. Pandle, he confessed, had proved him- 
self to be “temporarily an honest man.” Felix 
found Mr. Connla an entertaining person. 

Of a sanguine and impulsive disposition, he was 
better known for bravery than for such subtle talents 
as inform the traditional secret agent. He had, 
however, learned, from long contact with human 
nature in its crises, to be astonished at nothing, to 
regard without indignation the utmost depravity, 
to find in every delinquent, whether devoted to 
petty villainy or to great, something perhaps not 
alien to himself. In fine, he was a philosopher: 
and to stand beside him, on summer evenings, in 
front of Quilty’s windows, while with one racy 
phrase he tore the mask, so to speak, from the 
visages of passers-by, was, in Felix’s opinion, a 
“liberal education.” Once, Mackeron, formerly 
the tenor of “The Lost Venus,” now shabbier, sal- 
lower, and more nearly expressionless than ever, 
passed with a nod. Connla genially inquired of 
Felix: 

“Who’s your friend the dope fiend?” 


362 


PREDESTINED 


“You can’t mean that man!” 

“Why, me boy, look at the wooden face of him, 
and them little points of eyes. It’s cocaine or mor- 
phine, and, for my choice, cocaine. Ask him some 
day in his ear for a pinch o’ the white stuff. I’ll go 
bail that he’ll projuice it.” 

Felix did not re-enter the saloon that night. 

Was there not even a sinister similarity between 
his case and Mackeron’s? Once more he woke to 
full realization of his predicament, like a wayfarer, 
wandering in the darkness, who, at a lightning flash, 
finds himself surrounded by the most appalling 
perils. 

He sat down to discover the secret of this weak- 
ness, apparently unalterable. 

He reviewed his innumerable revulsions from de- 
bauchery, his momentary states of continence, his 
relapses. He marvelled at the swiftness with which, 
in him, intense repentance had ever been followed 
by impatience of restraint. He tried to understand 
the rapid change from disgust to fresh desire, wherein, 
invariably, a host of arguments, ingeniously evolved, 
to prove his vices detrimental, had with well-nigh 
inconceivable rapidity lost all value. He asked him- 
self “Why he was not like other men,” who could 
restrain themselves from ruinous excesses. 

But he remained without an answer to his query. 

Thereupon, he attempted to alarm himself with 
the direst of forebodings. He followed vagabonds 
reeling along the curb, to impress upon his mind 
the picture of their degradation. He got his asso- 


NINA 


363 

ciates to recount stories of lives wrecked by drink. 
He listened to evangelists preaching temperance on 
street corners, and, departing, with homely exhorta- 
tions ringing in his ears, swore that he had stood 
for the last time at a bar. Also, he repudiated 
tobacco, which seemed to increase his thirst for 
liquor. For an hour or two, he would observe men 
streaming in and out of cafes and tobacco shops 
with feelings of commiseration. 

Or perhaps, walking at night, beneath the moon, 
in parts of town where no such temptations were to 
be met, he experienced, all unexpectedly, a belief, 
in the beginning faint and tremulous, that he had 
finally left his frailty behind. From the wide-spread 
fulguration of the clouds, on the path of the moon- 
light, through the breathless ether, serenity flowed 
down into his heart; and an exaltation that drew 
value from the beauty, the immensity, and the 
purity of space, raised his whole body toward those 
heights which the soul instinctively informs with an 
eternal holiness. Then a presence, impalpable and 
yet undeniable, was closer to him than the nearest 
human being: and it needed apparently but a short 
continuation of this ecstasy to disembody forever 
the spirit already half released. His gazed roamed 
the heavens; his lips parted; the words broke from 
him, “Yes, I feel it now! I have been wrong. You 
are there! You have been there all the while! You 
will be there forever !” And stretching out his arms, 
he pleaded: 

“Save me now!” 


PREDESTINED 


3 6 4 

Could one sink again, after soaring to such alti- 
tudes? He went home sure that his nature had 
been altered to its depths. 

But afterward, he could not avoid wondering at 
the simplicity of his release. He asked himself, “Is 
it not strange, that I feel none of my old desires ?” 
His condition soon seemed to him almost too good 
to last : he was expecting, at every sight of swinging 
doors and tobacconists’ effigies, other sensations, as 
one expects, at the tridiurnal sight of a dining-room, 
a recurrence of hunger. 

“They will return, no doubt, those cravings. 
Well, I must be on the watch, and, at their approach, 
spring to arms.” 

Then, while wondering at their delay in laying 
siege to him, he felt their onslaught. At once, his 
contemplated manoeuvres all forgotten, he was like 
a warrior, enfeebled by the remembrance of innu- 
merable defeats, who sees at hand the crest of an 
enemy that has always worsted him. 

“How weak I am!” And each confession of 
weakness made his next overthrow the easier. 

Sometimes, pausing in a deserted street at mid- 
night, he raised his burning eyes toward the stars. 
“What a fool I was! Of all living things, only man 
is so fatuous, so conceited, as to believe himself 
worthy of immortality and the attentions of a god. 
A god, indeed! Well, supposing that there is one, 
a pretty world he has made, this time!” 

With distorted face, he shouted, ironically: 

“I say, up there! This is a sorry mess, this par- 


NINA 365 

ticular job! May a tenant, who didn’t seek his 
accommodations, presume to enter a complaint?” 

Silence fell. A chill ran down his back. 

Everything in life irritated him — the commonplace 
remarks of strangers, the stupid conduct of persons 
with whom he had nothing to do, the injustice of 
acts which harmonized with public opinion. When 
he read the newspapers, he growled at “the imbecility 
and vulgarity of humanity at large.” An obstruc- 
tion of traffic enraged him. A collar that did not 
button easily he tore into shreds. 

The disgust that he felt for everything connected 
with the boarding-house resulted in unprecedented 
outbursts. He would have liked to wring the necks 
of Mrs. Snatt’s children screeching at one another 
in the back yard; the noises that re-echoed nightly 
through the corridors excited in him an intense 
longing to “cut the throats of the whole gang.” 

But such violent moments were all solitary; his 
savagery, from cowardice, died out at the first word 
of ordinary intercourse: and none would have sus- 
pected, from his conversation, that he was often 
shaken, in secret, by a homicidal frenzy. 

It must have been generally observed, however, 
toward the middle of summer, that he was growing 
eccentric. 

While talking with an acquaintance, he became 
absent-minded, gazed into space, finally uttered an 
inappropriate comment. At Quilty’s, he would 
leave a gathering of revellers without excuses or 
farewells; and, at times, in the midst of a silence, 


PREDESTINED 


366 

he would raise his head abruptly, as if some one had 
called him. Truth is, he was frequently obsessed 
by this belief, particularly on a day following an 
exceptional drinking bout. He heard his name 
pronounced behind his back, but, on turning round, 
found no one near him. These voices usually re- 
sembled those of his companions of the previous 
evening. Once, though, he was frightened to hear 
a treble intonation like Emma’s. 

“Am I losing my mind?” 

Connla, to whom he confessed, in guarded 
language, this delusion, assured him, with a hearty 
laugh, that it was a natural concomitant of “the 
morning after.” Then, putting on a look of concern 
and approaching his protruding eyes to Felix’s, the 
detective added: 

“As a matter of fact, if you’ll excuse the liberty, 
you’d do best by letting up a bit on Quilty’s stuff, 
relation of mine though he may be. Take a run 
into the counthry. It’d do that terrier a world o’ 
good, besides. Or, at least, get some business 
that’ll occipy all your time.” 

This was what Felix was attempting to do; for he 
had just been discharged summarily from The Torch. 

He visited the editors of Sunday newspapers, with 
“special stories,” of a kind that could be illustrated 
by sensational pen-pictures reproduced over tints. 
These were tales of half-forgotten “soldiers of for- 
tune,” tragical histories of famous jewels, romances 
of old ships, anecdotes of Revolutionary landmarks. 
For such work, he received eight dollars a column; 


NINA 


3^7 

but the demand was limited, and “one did not think 
of a new theme every day.” He still had too much 
spare time on his hands. 

If only he could gather energy and wit enough to 
begin “that masterpiece!” He picked up Pierre 
Buron’s book. “Oh, fortunate wanderer in the laby- 
rinth, who did not lose himself before leaving behind 
his relic!” 

When he took pen in hand, an excruciating rest- 
lessness possessed him. He rose to pace the floor; 
he saw his hat lying on a chair; on approaching the 
door, he could not restrain himself from dashing out. 

Through byways in the district where he lived, he 
pursued, with the same wistfulness as in the past, 
the mirage of pleasure, now exceedingly dilute. 
And yet, just before his every disillusionment, when 
he seemed on the point of holding fast that which 
he was attempting to embrace, he discovered in the 
most uninspiring material something winsome — the 
tenuous charm that may lurk, for the inordinately 
desirous soul, beneath the meanest of superficies. 

Again, in desperation, reduced to a state of flac- 
cidity that shamed him, he frequented vaudeville 
shows, “smoking concerts,” and dime museums 
where, in the midst of languid men, he stood before 
the lecturer’s platform, listening to pompous absurdi- 
ties with a feeling that he was already wasted, 
finished, thrown away. 

At last, the monotony of familiar places became 
almost unbearable. Since the days were growing 
shorter, he walked, for a change, uptown. 


PREDESTINED 


368 

One evening, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth 
Street, his notice was attracted by a sign in the 
window of an art dealer’s shop, which read, “View 
of M. Paul Pavin’s 'Portrait of Lady and Child.’” 

Passing through an exhibition gallery, where the 
walls were crowded with many oil paintings in 
gilt frames, he entered a room hung with curtains 
of maroon velvet, and containing but one picture, 
revealed, straight ahead, beneath a flood of yellow 
light. A woman in a Nile green, iridescent evening 
dress was leaning forward, with a fluid movement, 
toward a cradle which occupied the foreground. 

It was Nina. 

The automobile was at the door; some scene of 
gayety — a dinner party, or, maybe, a dance — was 
waiting; and now, before setting out, the mother 
had entered the nursery to bid her child good-night. 
Bending over the cradle, with hands half unclasped 
before her breast, she was portrayed as her attitude 
of caution melted into a movement preliminary to a 
caress. For the baby, its small, round head half 
hidden by the swelling of the pillow, had opened its 
eyes; and on its face was displayed an expression 
of rapt wonder, at sight of the vision, exquisitely 
shining, that hovered over it. 

She had changed, perhaps. Her face had taken 
on the aspect of completion which sometimes, with 
motherhood, enriches intricately a beauty previously 
simple. And, thanks to a painter better known for 
cynicism than tenderness, there was exhaled from 
the canvas, notwithstanding the glamour of the ball 


NINA 369 

dress, something of the atmosphere that pervades, 
in cathedrals, certain pictures of maternity. 

Felix let his hands fall to his sides. 

This, then, was what he had lost! 


CHAPTER XVII 


Did her child content her? Did her husband 
please her? Where was she now? What was the 
tenor of her life ? 

He seemed to see her, clad in a dress of dull-blue 
silk, stooping to tend, with curling fingers, the 
flowers in a garden border. Or, ruddy and with 
wind-blown locks, she sat her horse in a gray skirt 
and a white linen waist, while from the hand encased 
in a stained glove there dangled a riding- whip. 
Again, her neck was bare, and decked with tur- 
quoises ; her hair pressed down about her brows in a 
thick braid, like a fillet; and nothing could have 
been more vivid than his visualization of her face — 
the alert eyes that searched his countenance, the 
upper lip lifted to a point as if inviting kisses, the 
softness and the candor of a look that he, on a night 
of smothered stars and perfumed foliage, had finally 
understood. 

“It is true: once upon a time, she offered herself 
to me!” 

That thought amazed him. 

For she inhabited a gentle and luxuriously fur- 
nished world, to which rumors of ignobility and of 
shabbiness penetrated no more distinctly than the 
whine of a mendicant’s accordeon filtering through 
the window draperies of a ball room. 

370 


NINA 


371 


He fell to pondering the various stages of his with- 
drawal from that sphere. 

Eileen, Marie, Emma! In each of these he 
should have perceived, before the irrevocable step, 
an instrument formed as if expressly for his deteriora- 
tion. And yet, toward the last as toward the first, 
he had been impelled by a longing both subtle and 
irresistible. 

To love, to be loved, not tranquilly, but intensely, 
not once, but often! Perhaps this desire was not to 
be separated from his other craving ? No doubt the 
two, symptomatic of an unquenchable appetency for 
inordinate emotions, went hand in hand ? 

Still, if the gratification of his sentimental yearn- 
ings had been painful, the reminiscences that lingered 
held a tenuous charm. Often, in moments of relaxa- 
tion, he had a quick thrill of memory : he recalled a 
period now strangely sweet to think of, but in ex- 
periencing which he had known only mental con- 
fusion and distress. Whenever he lamented, “If 
only I could begin again, and escape my follies !” 
the remonstrance was intruded, “But, in that case, 
what reveries I should miss!” 

Now, however, his life again lacked a romantic 
object. And thoughts of Nina began to occupy his 
mind. 

She, though possibly even in the same city, was as 
far removed from him as are the princesses of 
children’s fairy tales in their palaces fashioned out 
of one mammoth pearl ; and her very inaccessibility 
soon evoked an interest enriched by pathos, of a 


372 


PREDESTINED 


bewitching novelty because necessarily idealistic, 
absorbing, finally, all Felix’s habitual considerations 
of the horizon that could not be approached, the 
mirage visible only from afar, the dream one never 
attained. 

Had she forgotten him? Surely, at times, a 
chance word, a sound of long-familiar music, the 
tint of a sunset from a hilltop, or the odor of tube- 
roses, made her pause and think of Felix. And who 
could say but that into such reveries intruded some 
regrets? When familiar presences lost their attrac- 
tiveness, when repetition induced sensations of 
monotony, did she never send conjectures winging 
forth into the unknown, with the query, “What if it 
could have been otherwise?” 

Then there was a bond between them still ! 

Besides, the white bull-terrier was a gift of hers. 
Putting his arm round the dog’s neck, Felix whis- 
pered into an ear made ragged by the teeth of many 
a four-footed enemy : 

“I must take better care of this old fellow!” 

He forbade Delia, the housemaid, to feed Pat. He 
laid in a store of dog biscuits, bathed the brute every 
morning, and kept the brass-bound collar polished. 
On Sundays, he frequently relinquished his pet to 
the detective, for a run through the fields, along the 
New Jersey Palisades. 

Connla — on his “day off” an enthusiastic pedes- 
trian — inveigled Felix, once or twice, on autumn 
afternoons, into a ten-mile tramp to the north of the 
city. But the young man came back from such 


NINA 


373 


jaunts exhausted, with the appearance of a person 
who, in the detective’s phrase, had been “ chased by 
the Indians.” In fact, the degeneration of his 
muscles, the disability of his lungs, and the irregu- 
lar action of his heart, prevented Felix from con- 
tinuing those excursions. His wanderings rarely 
extended far from Fourteenth Street. 

There the signs of penny arcades, shooting gal- 
leries, and “medical museums” were spread out 
above bemirrored doorways; dirty awnings every- 
where let down their scalloped edges; the thorough- 
fare was obstructed by cubical showcases containing 
nickel-plated toilet sets, false teeth, flimsy waistcoats, 
and roughly printed post-cards; while shop-keepers 
in slack trousers stood on their thresholds, the 
“pullers in” of clothing merchants paced back and 
forth with predacious eyes, the door-keeper of a con- 
cert hall, armed with a club, drove ragamuffins from 
before the bill-boards, and, amid the crowd, women 
of various ages, with bobbing plumes and switch- 
ing skirts, exhibited their complaisant faces, their 
draggled petticoats, and their shoes run down at the 
heels. 

The October rains came to wash this avenue: 
then winter reached town; and, an hour after every 
fall of snow, brown slush, churned into mud by a 
multitude of feet, covered the pavements. The 
street where stood Mrs. Snatt’s boarding-house was, 
apparently, of too little importance often to be 
cleared. Heaps of snow, accumulating along the 
gutters, were buried under dirt and rubbish ; grocers’ 


374 


PREDESTINED 


wagons, drawing up in front of doorways, sank to 
their hubs; and, whenever thaws set in, a chilly 
dampness was exhaled on the night air. Old men, 
with their hands pressed against their throats, went 
along coughing. Mrs. Snatt’s two eldest children 
fell ill. 

For that matter, she was usually worried about 
both of them. 

The boy, six years old, suffered from nervous 
irritability, and slight, involuntary muscular con- 
tractions. He would sit for hours with his large 
head lowered, his mouth open, his eyes vacant; then, 
abruptly looking upward, he would give vent to a 
prolonged howl. Talking a jargon comprehensible 
only to his mother, he could not be made to study 
his primer, and, indeed, seemed incapable of learn- 
ing anything. When crossed, Willie went into fits 
of rage, threw himself upon the floor, beat his face 
with his hands, and screamed. Besides, he was 
almost as badly off as Job for boils. 

The four-year-old girl did not enjoy the chubbi- 
ness usual in children of her age. With wan eye's 
and a fixed, listless smile, she dragged her spindling 
legs along; and the hairless doll that she fondled 
was scarcely less responsive than Jennie to surprises. 
Her face brightened, however, when Pat appeared 
before her with grinning jaws; and once, when Felix 
brought home a new doll with taffy-colored curls, he 
was rewarded by a slowly gathering expression of 
beatitude. 

But the baby, its cheeks round and rosy, its tiny 


NINA 


375 


mouth continually blowing bubbles of saliva, crowed, 
winked, and beat its short arms against its bib from 
lustihood. 

“By George,” Felix complimented Mrs. Snatt, 
“this little chap is vigorous enough.” 

“Oh, yes/’ the landlady assented, with an uneasy 
look. 

She was harassed, in addition, by business cares. 
Her tenants, for the most part transient, sometimes 
disappeared leaving behind a battered trunk full of 
newspapers and bricks. The clairvoyant, in the 
ground floor front, a specialty of whose it was to 
direct patrons toward the road to wealth, contem- 
plated the abandonment of her profession. This 
soothsayer, it appeared, was eaten up with chagrin 
because she did not have “the luck of some people” 
— of a woman, for instance, who, with great profit, 
was establishing a fashionable trade uptown, “an 
interloper” — in fine — “that called herself Mme. 
Babbage.” 

Then, too, “The King and Queen of Polite 
Vaudeville” were likely, at any time, to receive 
the most flattering offers in respect of a long tour. 

Mr. Delaclaire, a short, bow-legged, bull-necked 
person of fifty, with the lineaments of a Roman 
Emperor in hard luck, had made his neighbor’s 
acquaintance by the simple expedient of “borrow- 
ing” a match. An introduction to his wife was 
inevitable; so Felix made his bow before a stout, 
domestic-looking woman of middle age, whose hair 
had nearly all reassumed its original brown, and 


PREDESTINED 


376 

whose shape, in corsets that sank inward just below 
the breast, recalled the fashion plates of other 
days. 

When young, Mrs. Delaclaire had carried a 
spear in theatrical productions full of good and 
wicked sprites, of transformation scenes, of dis- 
appearing demons, and of red fire. In her hours 
of relaxation she had met the Thespian, who, at 
that time, by the aid of thickened shoe-soles, had 
even played such roles as The Ghost of Hamlet's 
Father , and An Old Fellow Set Up to Personate 
Vincentio. Though they earned their living, nowa- 
days, by performing farces in cheap vaudeville 
theatres, he had not entirely abandoned his belief 
that he was a pattern for a Shakespearian actor; 
and, occasionally, carried away by glimpses of old 
visions, he threw himself into an attitude, humped 
his back, put on a distracted look, and bellowed, 
in a way to shake the window-panes : 

“I think there be six Richmonds in the field; 

Five have I slain to-day, instead of him: 

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse !” 

Of mornings, when he heard Felix moving about, 
Mr. Delaclaire frequently shouted through the par- 
tition for “a loan” of the newspaper. Then the 
young man found the Thespian still in bed, with 
his bristly dewlaps resting on the upper hem of the 
counterpane. 

“Aha! Salutations! Is it cold to-day? Good! 
Then I can wear my fur coat !” 


NINA 


377 


He had, indeed, such a garment, between brown 
and green, cut in at the back, boasting a wealth of 
ravelled frogs; while the pelt with which it was 
lined — of some yellowish animal unknown to Felix — 
had not given out before furnishing a pair of cuffs. 

The couple cooked late breakfasts in a saucepan, 
over the gas jet, kept bottles of beer on the outer 
window-sill, sent two shirts and a petticoat to the 
laundry every week, maintained a high state of 
neglige so long as they remained indoors, sailed out 
arm in arm, with all their finery on their backs, lived 
from day to day, were fond of each other. 

Their offspring was named Edwin Booth Dela- 
claire. Felix sometimes saw a lean youth of seven- 
teen, pale, loutish, with elusive eyes, who spent his 
time consuming cigarettes before saloons, in the 
company of hoodlums wearing lavender stockings 
and green glass cravat pins. As a child, the son had 
assisted his parents on the stage, disguised in vel- 
veteen suits, lace collars, and angelic wigs: he had 
thrilled audiences by reconciling husband and wife 
about to part, by awakening with his innocent prattle 
the conscience of a burglar, by expiring with a long 
speech advising his father to be a better man. But 
now, too old to be spanked into submission, he 
rebelled against that occupation, refused, moreover, 
to work at anything, drank cocktails, kept question- 
able company, seldom came home except to sleep 
or to demand money from his parents, of whom he 
was obviously ashamed. Mr. Delaclaire confessed to 
Felix that “Eddie” was a source of worriment to him. 


378 


PREDESTINED 


“ The career we expected of that child ! The news- 
paper clippings I can show you! The talents he 
ought to have inherited !” 

And Delaclaire launched into family history. 

His own father, long a member of the theatrical 
company of Edwin Booth, had been the most fiery 
Tybalt , the fiercest Laertes , of his day. “Not to 
mention that he was a wild one off the boards, as 
well as on them. The whiskey he could get away 
with! To tell the truth, if it hadn’t been for that, 
he might have played Romeo — yes, or Hamlet , under 
Booth’s very nose.” 

“Such a heritage of talent should be valuable,” 
was Felix’s polite comment. 

“And yet,” mused Mr. Delaclaire, “others man- 
age without it. Look at Miss Vinnie Vatelle, up- 
stairs. She does song and dance, with three changes, 
in the vaudeville circuit: her act goes big; and yet 
her father was quite an ordinary feller — a plumber, 
I think.” 

Miss Vinnie Vatelle was the thin-faced damsel 
with the straw-colored psyche-knot. Felix made 
her acquaintance through Mrs. Delaclaire, who 
professed that “the poor girl was dying to meet 
him.” 

Though her cheeks were rouged, she appeared 
tired; and the rice powder which she had rubbed 
under her light blue eyes had settled at the roots 
of her lashes. 

Looking up at Felix coyly, she inquired, in a flat 
voice : 


NINA 


379 


“You don’t eat in the house, I notice, Mr. Piers?” 

He explained that his affairs took him too much 
abroad. 

“I don’t blame you. The food’s nothing extra, 
and all my instincts goes against basement dining- 
rooms. They’re so — I don’t know — so ” 

She shrugged her shoulders in an imitation of pa- 
trician haughtiness. 

Nearly every night, thereafter, he met her on the 
stairs. She hesitated ; he paused in his ascent ; they 
leaned against the balustrade to talk. If he was 
sober enough, they sat down on the landing, their 
feet stretched across the second step below them. 
Her shoes, with fawn-colored cloth tops considerably 
soiled, and crumpled toes of patent leather, were 
short and broad. The perfume that she wore was 
of so flagrant an aroma as to make Felix dizzy. 
While conversing, Miss Vatelle munched chewing 
gum. 

She was always ready to talk about “her art,” 
her struggles, and her early life. She gave him to 
understand that she had been married when “very, 
very young.” That relationship had soon ended on 
account of incompatibility of temper. He was a 
clerk in a provincial hotel: she had met him while 
travelling the vaudeville circuit. Soon she was go- 
ing to start off again on tour; and one evening, 
her departure being imminent, when Felix met her 
in the corridor, she burst into tears. 

At first, she would give no explanation of this grief. 
Finally, however, she stammered: 


38 ° 


PREDESTINED 


“Hasn’t a woman always got the right to cry 
about a wedding?” 

“A wedding!” 

Miss Qewan, he was informed, had just been 
married quietly to her benefactor. They had gone, 
for their honeymoon, to Niagara Falls. 

That night, in Quilty’s saloon, champagne was 
served to the habitues. The merry-making was 
marred by only one incident: Mr. Pandle, relaxing 
his pessimistic visage to essay some seasonable quip, 
had his wig knocked off his head by the bar- 
tender. 

When Quilty returned, the young man was among 
the quickest to offer him congratulations. 

“And Mrs. Quilty’s little sister, who is away at 
school?” 

The bartender, after scrutinizing Felix for a 
moment, responded, briefly: 

“She’ll live with us.” 

But Mrs. Snatt now had another room unoccupied. 
Besides, her husband unexpectedly returned. 

At nightfall, Delia, wringing her grimy hands, 
brought the news upstairs. One knew what to 
expect thenceforth! Bills would be run up at wine- 
shops; money paid out by tenants would pass into 
the prodigal’s pocket ; the landlady would economize 
still further; the boarders would rail against' the 
food; and, in the midst of threats, altercations, de- 
partures, tears, infantile wails, and general frenzy, 
the author of these misfortunes would continue to 
indulge an insatiable thirst. 


NINA 381 

“But why doesn’t she throw him into the street?” 
inquired Felix. 

“Ah, sir, that’s not so aisy, either, the way things 
is in this house. Bad cess to him! Would you 
just listen to that?” 

A shout rose from the back yard. 

“Delia! You come downstairs this minute and 
run my errand! Am I the master here, or ain’t I?” 

In the failing light, beneath the stretched clothes- 
lines, a squat figure oscillated clumsily. A broad 
face was upturned, with dyed side whiskers running 
into a mustache, a face on which Felix thought to 
perceive a narrow mask, dull red, extending across 
the nose. But this proved to be an eruption from 
alcoholic poisoning. 

Mr. Snatt was the ex-drummer of the Trocadero 
Theatre. 

He soon fulfilled the various predictions made of 
him. And, not unlike Nero, plucking at a harp 
while Rome burned down, the inebriate, with his 
wife’s venture tottering about his ears, occasionally 
got out his snare-drum and a tattered score of 
“Poet and Peasant,” the drummer’s part of which 
opera he rehearsed from overture to finale, rocking 
in his chair, compressing his large lips, rolling his 
eyes in their inflamed sockets, and, no matter how 
far gone in liquor, not omitting so much as a flourish. 
At last, Mrs. Snatt overcame her delicacy and asked 
Felix for eighteen dollars due her. 

He was nearly beside himself for lack of money. 

So slowly did his brain evolve ideas, that it took 


PREDESTINED 


382 

him a week to write a “ special story” for the Sunday 
newspapers. Then, too, his time for such perform- 
ances was limited: the middle of the day was gen- 
erally the only period when he could set pen to 
paper with profitable effect. 

But in Quilty’s saloon, he met the proprietor of 
an establishment where moving pictures were de- 
vised. This person needed the services of a writer 
endowed with sufficient imagination and dramatic 
instinct to construct brief scenarios appropriate for 
performance, in dumb show, before the camera. 
Fifteen dollars was the price paid for the average 
manuscript. 

It was, at least, a chance. 

Felix, reflecting that the patrons of Fourteenth 
Street theatres rarely paid an admission fee of more 
than ten cents, recollected melodramas the crude 
“ situations” of which had formerly filled him with 
pity for their authors. He dismissed from his mind 
his last aspirations toward subtlety, poetry, and 
technical excellence in exposition; he invited, in- 
stead, those motives of inordinate heroism, villainy, 
and self-sacrifice attaining the excessive climaxes 
so satisfactory to the leaders of dull lives, who, 
untroubled by an access of logic, glimpse, in the 
feverish adventures of protagonists exquisitely valiant 
and magnanimous, something of their own secret 
longings. 

So, in Felix’s scenarios, the heads of convicts were 
surrounded by halos of nobility, the hero stopped 
the heroine’s runaway horse, “the papers” were dis- 


NINA 


383 

covered in the nick of time, the villain was hand- 
cuffed by half a dozen policemen, the lovers fell into 
each other’s arms, and, in the midst of large gestures, 
revolver shots, and disguises thrown off instan- 
taneously, virtue triumphed, and vice grovelled in 
dismay. The young man was able to pay Mrs. 
Snatt, to buy new shoes and an overcoat, to see 
more money disappear into Mr. Quilty’s till. 

His expenditures in the saloon had resulted in a 
trifling economy elsewhere. He was no longer under 
the necessity of paying for breakfast, as he could 
swallow no food till mid-day. 

It had become for him a matter of course to 
relapse after good resolutions. His hours of con- 
tinence, grown shorter, now, than ever, were fraught 
with apprehensions. 

The sight of bars, of cafe signs, even of advertise- 
ments, in the trolley-cars and the newspapers, lauding 
an especial brand of whiskey, were to him all sym- 
bols of the power that had mastery over him. He 
would have tried to flee them; he averted his eyes; 
but they, unavoidable, like a hydra in a nightmare, 
multiplied about him at his every turn: on dead 
walls, in glittering windows, overhead — at night — in 
brilliant signs that vanished but to spring forth 
immediately against the stars, or above doorways 
illumined by a warm radiance, the portals of which 
seemed to give inward, on their well-oiled hinges, at 
the slightest pressure, as do the mechanisms of pitfalls. 

Still, in the depths of his heart, there languished 
part of the aspiration of his early youth, which 


PREDESTINED 


384 

inebriety resuscitated. His surroundings rendered 
vague, his decline forgotten, he reproduced, to some 
extent, old ardors, dreamed of recovery, found the 
thought of quick reform not unreasonable. Raising 
his head, to cast round him a look both wavering 
and proud, he bade farewell to the scenes that he 
was enduring “for the last time.” Next morning, 
however, that self-confidence had failed. 

When he went out, a threnody as if of super- 
natural voices dominated the noises of the street, 
while familiar sounds seemed to reach him from 
a great distance. Pedestrians floated past like 
shadows; and all faces, appearing to him through 
a sort of haze, assumed an unnatural aspect. Was 
it a real world through which he took his way, or 
was his the only actual personality extant? At 
times, the countenance of Emma, now difficult to 
recall in its entirety, was not more ambiguous than 
the visages that loomed round him. 

His depression relieved by his morning drinks of 
brandy, he thought, perhaps, of a hilltop spread with 
flowers, where he had bade farewell to happiness. 

Did she still spend part of her summers there? 
Then the garden at night, the hillside at sunset, the 
narrow roadway through the woods at noon, re- 
called to her a dead romance. Did she travel? 
Then, in Swiss valleys and before antiquated French 
chateaux, she missed the response of an enthusiasm 
once quick to complete her own. Was she in town ? 
Then she found sadness inextricable from some ball, 
and, at the opera, listened to familiar arias with a pang. 


NINA 


385 

One day, while reading a newspaper, in a list of 
guests at a fashionable assembly he found her name. 
She was in New York! 

Frequently, thereafter, when similar entertain- 
ments, scheduled in the newspapers, took place 
uptown, Felix was standing in a vestibule near by. 

A striped canopy extended from the lintel to the 
curb, where a tall footman reached out to open the 
doors of automobiles as they glided to a standstill. 
Beneath the arch of canvas many women, cloaked to 
the ears, showing white satin boots, with diamonds 
flashing in their coiffures, appeared, and immediately 
vanished. If she was there, he did not recognize 
her. When all had entered, he turned homeward. 
Rain began to fall; and the dog, pattering ahead, 
seemed at each step to pierce, with elongated legs, 
the glistening pavement. 

Mrs. Snatt, announcing that “a gentleman had 
called to see him,” produced a visiting card with a 
dirty thumb mark on it. 

“Oliver Corquill. So he has run me down!” 

Next afternoon, the novelist appeared at the 
boarding-house. 

He made no remarks about Felix’s behavior at 
their last meeting, the young man’s disappearance 
from Washington Square, or the means by which 
this last pursuit had been consummated. But, after 
glancing round the bedroom, he remarked: 

“A very snug, secluded little nook, I should 
imagine, for literary work.” 

Felix’s cheeks began to burn. He stared, with a 


PREDESTINED 


386 

feeling of animosity, at the celebrity, who wore 
underneath an overcoat lined with sealskin a suit of 
dark brown cheviot, who displayed, above patent 
leather shoes, stockings of brown ribbed silk, and 
who had in the buttonhole of his left lapel a white 
carnation. 

“ Spare me your sarcasm !” 

Corquill assumed an expression of surprise. 

“ Why, my dear fellow, I thought that I was falling 
in with your ideas! Isn’t this retreat your deliber- 
ate choice? What else can one suppose, when you 
conceal yourself from friends who have other plans 
for you, when you refuse, indeed, the most excep- 
tional opportunities to effect a change?” He had 
received a letter from Pavin, who was travelling in 
Algeria. 

Felix lowered his head. 

“It’s true: I must cut a miserable figure before 
both of you! But it wasn’t altogether my fault.” 

“Well, then, I must remind you that I have never 
yet enjoyed your confidence.” 

“What use would it serve to recount a history of 
errors?” 

“When two become allies, both must know the 
characteristics of an enemy, to attack him with 
success.” 

An ally! Was it, indeed, in such a guise that 
Corquill, his sealskin coat-tails flapping, his white 
carnation an oriflamme, sallied into an all but 
stricken field? 

They dined together, in a restaurant near Union 


NINA 


3 8 7 

Square. Corquill made no objection to a bottle of 
champagne, or to entering, afterward, a cafe in the 
neighborhood. The young man, his reserve abol- 
ished, finally, by his potations, talked of himself. 

Once started, Felix did not find it difficult to re- 
late his troubles. He felt, indeed, in his parade of 
past experiences, a sensation that had something in 
common with the relief of a wrong-doer, too weak 
to rectify his misdemeanors alone, who whispers 
through the grille of a confessional. Some of the 
blame seemed to fall from his offences, when two 
minds shared the knowledge of them. 

The other, turning his glass continually between 
his fingers, listened with impassive face. His first 
comment was: 

“It’s a puzzle !” 

And, after a minute’s thought, 

“Our friend Wickit, the lawyer, was thoroughly 
conversant with your family’s affairs?” 

“Of course. What then?” 

Apparently, Corquill did not hear that question. 
At last, staring at the table-top, he pronounced: 

“There is an answer to everything.” 

They left the cafe. In Union Square, lamps shed 
their yellow rays upon expanses of white snow, 
which were transected by black, asphalt paths. 
Near a circular fountain, on a wooden bench, a man 
in mean clothes was leaning forward, his head lower 
than his body, one hand resting on the ground to 
keep him from toppling over, while, with a little 
piece of ice, he traced in unsteady fashion upon 


PREDESTINED 


388 

the asphalt some disconnected numerals. The two 
pedestrians stopped. The stranger slowly raised his 
head. 

His thin, white face was covered with a straggling 
beard, half black, half gray; from either side of his 
delicate nose the flesh had fallen away ; and, beneath 
brows abnormally projecting, eyes sunken and veiled 
in shadows regarded, with a sort of mournful blank- 
ness, the two witnesses. In his effort to straighten 
himself, he recoiled violently against the bench back : 
his hat fell off; and one saw a bald skull shining, 
covered with protuberances. 

He gazed at Corquill. His eyes wandered to 
Felix. The young man and the derelict regarded 
each other solemnly. At last, both smiled. 

“What are you making there ?” asked Felix, in 
low tones. 

“Pardon?” 

And Felix, staring down at him in surprise, re- 
peated his inquiry in French. 

The stranger answered naturally, though some- 
what thickly: 

“I am writing figures of 5, that look like wolves 
at bay in the forest, and figures of 2, that make 
me think of the smile of Aphrodite, and figures of 
4, that resemble knights in German armor riding to 
a tourney.” 

Abruptly standing up, he reeled. The young man 
caught him by the arm. 

“Where do you live?” 

The other fixed his shadowy eyes on Felix. 


NINA 


38 9 


“You could never find the way.” 

“On the contrary, I can find it easily.” 

“Twenty-seventh Street, then, beyond Sixth 
Avenue. Is it far?” 

They set out northward, the young man and the 
derelict proceeding slowly, arm in arm, Corquill 
pacing beside them silently. 

On Twenty-seventh Street, beyond Sixth Avenue, 
they entered a French quarter. The windows of 
little shops were inscribed with the legends: 11 Coif- 
feur Francois,” u Pharmacie Franqaisef 11 Manu- 
facture de Tabac .” They halted before a four-story 
brown-stone house that looked as if it were sinking 
into the ground. A plumber’s shop occupied the 
basement; all the windows contained old shades of 
dull blue cloth; a flight of thirteen steps ascended 
to the doorway, which was sheltered by a little porch 
of rusty metal-work. 

“It is here, is it not?” 

But the Frenchman, rocking on the young man’s 
arm, was peering down the street, westward, toward 
a bright, low-hanging star. 

“A beacon that, for its lustre, might surmount 
the Pharos, guiding in the painted sails, making 
clear, on the long jetty, the wilted wreaths of revellers 
returning home, and the faces of Greek women 
loitering in robes of painted gauze. A beacon that 
might surmount, for us, to-night, the Pharos! But, 
alas, no Alexandria underneath!” His face sank 
forward. Tears, issuing from the shadows in which 
lurked his eyes, dripped upon the ragged beard. 


390 


PREDESTINED 


The door above them opened. In the hallway, 
loomed a female figure, of formidable proportions, 
wearing a species of dressing gown in front con- 
siderably shorter than in back. A hoarse, contralto 
voice called out, with a menacing accent : 

“Is it you, at last?” 

The derelict, developing a nimbleness that sur- 
prised his escort, scrambled up the thirteen steps. 
The hallway engulfed him : the door was immediately 
slammed shut. 

“One might pray,” said Corquill, “never to know 
the state of that poor devil.” 

Felix, the blood rushing to his head, turned upon 
the novelist, with curling lip. 

“Save your pity! As for you, rest assured that 
you will never become like him. One does not 
exceed his own mental limitations!” 

Corquill stood motionless. Then, his face pale, he 
made the other a bow, presented his back, departed. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


One afternoon in March, Felix found himself 
ascending the thirteen steps of the dwelling house in 
West Twenty-seventh Street. The door — its small 
pane of ground glass covered with an iron grating — 
was opened grudgingly by the virago who, at the 
time of Felix’s previous expedition thither, had 
received the intoxicated Frenchman. 

Unkempt, extraordinarily fat, with a neck of sev- 
eral folds, a dingy face, and black mustaches, she 
had, nevertheless, a pair of brilliant eyes, provocative 
of conjectures, like a hint of bygone splendor dis- 
covered amid ruins. 

After scrutinizing the young man from head to 
foot, she assumed a promising look. 

Felix, asking himself what excuse he had for that 
intrusion, was inclined to run down the steps. 
However, he blurted out: 

“The gentleman with whom I came here the other 
night — is he in?” 

Her features immediately expressed truculence. 

“What gentleman?” 

Felix attempted to recall the occasion to her. 
Perhaps she would remember the dog ? He pointed 
to Pat, who, seated on the topmost step, was looking 
up at her without sympathy, 

391 


392 


PREDESTINED 


“I know of no such person, Monsieur. You went 
somewhere else.” 

He was leaving, when she detained him. 

“Who sent you here?” she inquired, violently. 

Disconcerted, Felix fell back upon the truth. He 
had been actuated by interest in a stranger who, 
during the brief moments of a chance meeting, had 
said “some remarkable things.” He had to con- 
fess an anxiety to renew that acquaintance — no 
doubt a presumptuous inclination. “My excuse, 
Madame, is the allure of intellect. But that, I fear, 
is scarcely an excuse to offer others; indeed, it no 
longer seems plausible to me.” 

Then, reflecting that there could hardly be need 
of further apologies to this slattern, he straightened 
his back, raised his hat, and again turned away. 

Her face softened. 

“So he can still play the spendthrift? Eh, that is 
a Fortunatus’s purse he carries, the old incorrigible! 
There, pardon me, Monsieur: we all have our buga- 
boos. He is across the street, in the cafe.” 

Directly opposite, a small dram shop, painted 
yellow, seemed, with its squat bay-windows bulging 
outward, to be succumbing gradually beneath the 
weight of a four-story building. A plate-glass pane 
displayed, in letters of white enamel, the informa- 
tion, “Cafe de la Patrie.” 

The cafe ceiling, long and narrow, covered with 
sheets of stamped metal, hung low: owing to this, 
and to the dull hue of the walls, the place was 
shadowy. On the right, extended a row of tables- 


NINA 


393 


on the left, the bar presented its worn woodwork 
and perforated brass beer tray. No customers were 
visible. 

“ Monsieur desires ” 

It was the bartender, or, rather, the proprietor. 
A plump little fellow, with white hair parted in the 
middle, and gaining jauntiness from a dyed and 
waxed mustache, he looked as if some one had just 
told him a questionable anecdote. This was his 
habitual expression. 

He directed Felix to the rear of the cafe. 

There, two pool tables, one behind the other, 
announced their past popularity by the raggedness 
of their pockets, and the amount of sticking plaster 
on their green cloths. Beyond them, a diffuse 
light entered between iron bars — through which one 
saw a yard replete with empty bottles — and pene- 
trated an alcove to the right, there to make poly- 
chromatic a goblet half full of absinthe and water, 
to touch a hand as narrow and of nearly as cadaver- 
ous an exility as the hand of an Egyptian mummy, 
and to set shining a bald head, large and lumpy, 
raised above a copy of the Messager des Etats-Unis. 
The newspaper sank from before the pale counte- 
nance, the straggling beard, and the sunken eyes 
surrounded by wide circles, that had remained in 
Felix’s thoughts. 

Again he was inclined to make his escape. But, 
while saying to himself, “What a ridiculous proceed- 
ing,” he advanced. 

“Monsieur has forgotten me? We returned to- 


394 


PREDESTINED 


gether to his house, one evening not long ago. The 
Pharos was illuminated.” 

The stranger, after taking thought, smiled apa- 
thetically. 

“I do not remember. So the Pharos was illu- 
minated?” 

His voice, high and unsteady, drifted into a half 
hysteric laugh. Then, apparently in an access of 
curiosity, peering at the other, he said, nervously: 

“Sit down, Monsieur.” 

They drank, that afternoon, half a dozen glasses 
of absinthe together; and, since Felix then had his 
first experience with tobacco of Algerian manufact- 
ure, they consumed between them as many packets 
of cigarettes. 

The other, it seemed, was a Parisian. They 
talked of Paris — of the boulevards, the buildings, and 
that indefinable “soul” which distinguishes a city no 
less than a human being, and which, at recollection, 
brings to the wanderer a nostalgia not unlike a long- 
ing to perceive again the charms of a once beloved 
individual. But Felix’s companion, to. whom few 
corners of the earth were unfamiliar, had not seen 
Paris for many years. Spots named by him stirred 
no memories in the mind of the young man, who, 
for his part, alluded frequently to resorts and insti- 
tutions that had sprung up since the Frenchman’s 
day. So, from time to time, they fell silent, both 
touched, no doubt, by the sadness which the disap- 
pearance of old landmarks causes — to those who re- 
member them, and to those who have not known them. 


NINA 


395 

The elder, however, disclosed some compensating 
reminiscences. 

He led the way, as it were, out of the dram shop 
in West Twenty-seventh Street — where twilight was 
creeping through the window bars — and into a region 
of constricted, tortuous alleys, of old, rickety houses 
with mansard roofs and many chimney pots, of oriels, 
carved by workmen of the seventeenth century, that 
adjoined blank walls made bright with frivolous bill 
boards advertising public balls at the “Mabille,” 
of mediaeval dormer windows overlooking butcher 
shops where grisettes in their dressing sacks came 
yawning to buy a chicken wing — in short, to that 
traditional district seething, once upon a time, from 
cobble-stones to attics, with artistic ardors, icon- 
oclastic frenzies, licentiousness, and momentary pro- 
digality, in recalling which old men say sadly, “The 
Latin Quarter is no more.” 

And the cafes! Their doors opened: straightway 
appeared the long mirrors, the white-topped tables, 
the garnet-colored plush of their settees; and, 
through a mist, one saw characters with unconven- 
tional beards and flowing bows, the pioneers of 
aestheticisms once new, but now discarded, leaning 
forward in all the febrile poses deemed necessary 
for the synthesis of artificial lives. 

But Felix was not used to drinking absinthe in 
such quantities, and his expectance of a singular 
result from it induced intoxication rapidly! The 
pictures conjured up by his companion gradually 
faded; the sound of a high-pitched monologue 


PREDESTINED 


396 

reached him but at intervals; and he woke, next 
day, in his own bed, ignorant of the episodes which 
had terminated the adventure. 

Relishing this taste of congenial history decanted 
at first hand, he returned to the Cafe de la Patrie 
for a deeper draught. 

The proprietor informed him that the Parisian 
had not yet arrived. “It took an old fellow of his 
sort some time, every day, to find his legs.” 

He was called Monsieur Pierre. For two years — 
in fact, ever since the virago’s appearance in Twenty- 
seventh Street — he had been “a fixture” across the 
way. It was the general impression that he got his 
spending money from this Mme. Wargla, whose 
name, the proprietor admitted, was, at least, not 
French. She took in lodgers; but such was her tem- 
per that she often deluged with abuse a stranger 
who rang her door-bell. 

“And yet, he is a highly educated man? He has 
seen the world. He has known interesting per- 
sons.” 

The cafe keeper shrugged his shoulders. 

“ Who knows ? He has been somebody, maybe ? ” 

Nowadays, however, it was an “off night” for him 
if he got up the thirteen steps without assistance. 

The clock struck four. They fell silent. A 
hand, narrow and fleshless, trembled against the 
door; and Monsieur Pierre, his eyes blank of all 
expression, feebly entered the cafe. He had come 
for his “resuscitation.” 

Felix had, at first, some difficulty in identifying 


NINA 


397 


himself. But a gleam of intelligence appeared in 
the absinthe drinker’s wandering orbs. 

“Ah! ah! It is you? You have come back, then? 
In the alcove, eh? We shall be very comfortable. 
More comfortable than in my house, where there 
happens to be no room.” 

The proprietor accentuated his habitual expres- 
sion. 

Felix became familiar with the shadowy resort, 
with the street full of foreign signs and faces, even 
with the establishment of Mme. Wargla, whither he 
sometimes went when the “diverting old type” did 
not appear on time in the cafe. 

In this house, the staircases and the floors of 
gloomy corridors were covered with oilcloth; doors 
creaked on their hinges; steps resounded on the 
landings; then there brushed past a man with a 
smooth-shaven, oily face and the aspect of a waiter 
off duty, or a woman with a fringe of hair, dark 
and heavy, falling over her brow beneath headgear 
of singular style. Monsieur Pierre issued, at an 
infirm gait, into the hallway, hid his bald scalp 
beneath a black felt hat, and straightway accom- 
panied his visitor across the street. 

Between these two grew up, presently, a species of 
regard — in the younger engendered by a feeling 
that here, beneath depravation, existed a congenial 
spirit, in the elder roused, possibly, by the realiza- 
tion that he had, at last, company in his intellectual 
ramblings. It was when Felix succeeded in follow- 
ing him, one night, into the half-discovered country 


PREDESTINED 


398 

of Greek criticism, that Monsieur Pierre made no 
bones of embracing the other in French fashion, with 
the words: 

“My dear Pierce! There is an oasis in every 
desert, after all!” 

That was his pronunciation of the young man’s 
name. 

They had their own corner — the alcove near the 
back window. Many patrons of the cafe, inured to 
that Anglo-Saxon mode of drinking devised as if for 
a greater benefit to liquor sellers, stood at the bar, 
their attitudes conducive to a restlessness which 
bore fruit in orders more frequent than if suggested 
by a natural desire. Others, in their shirt sleeves, 
played pool upon the lacerated baize. In a corner, 
usually, sat an octogenarian with a fringe of fluffy, 
white whiskers round his chin, his 'glass of absinthe 
at hand, and, at his feet, a brown, mongrel dog so old, 
and of a mien so wretched, that Pat was evidently 
ashamed to bite him. After finishing his drink, the 
ancient folded his hands, let his head sink forward, 
and took a nap. A shaft of ruddy light crept up his 
neck and seemed to set fire to his whiskers : the sun- 
set, in fact, had even thrust a little of its glory into 
the back yard. There, above the piles of empty bot- 
tles, a small ailantus tree, its pinnated leaves anod, 
heralded, with a rank odor, the advent of spring. 

They talked of spring in Paris. But Felix would 
say, presently: 

“Let us talk, rather, of the Cafe Francois Premier.” 

It was there that the artists and the men of let- 


NINA 


399 


ters had gathered, three decades before. Monsieur 
Pierre could recall their faces, their mannerisms, 
their discussions — the combats of the impressionists 
and the conservatives, the wars of stippled paint 
against square brush strokes, the derision in which 
the realistic novel writers held the naturalists, then 
the manias for symbolism, for diabolism, for ghastli- 
ness, for anything that could shock by its novelty 
that democracy which, in art, “is always react ion- 
ary.” Or one was transported to studios of a bizarre 
complexion, where painters, poets, and women whose 
faces reappeared, thereafter, on the walls of the 
Luxembourg, sat listening to the sighing of a violon- 
cello played by a musician whose work no public 
would accept. And, afterward, “What colors did 
the sounds of different musical instruments call to 
mind? What hue had the vowels? Was Friday 
violet, and Sunday yellow?” 

“And among all these, Monsieur Pierre, you, too, 
played your part?” 

“My part was quickly played,” the other re- 
sponded with his hysterical laugh. 

But he had known, among that assembly of 
Parisians, Afro-French, and Belgians, Villiers de 
PIsle Adam, and Mallarme, the wistful and evasive 
symbolist, Catulle Mendes, and De Banville, who 
sang just because he loved the sound of limpid voca- 
bles, Leconte de Lisle, and that reincarnation of 
Francois Villon, Verlaine. 

Drinking off his absinthe, Monsieur Pierre burst 
forth, with a wild manner, into some poem by 


400 


PREDESTINED 


Heredia; and his listener gazed on a brazen world, 
on caravans splashed with ochre, seen through 
quivering air, on a mirage of crumbling mosques, 
and on green moonlight drained through palm 
leaves into a pool. 

“Buron should have been among these,” thought 
Felix, and asked his companion if he knew that 
writer. The other set down his glass. 

“ You know him? You have read him?” 

And, after a pause, smoothing his beard with 
trembling fingers, he replied, in his cracked voice : 

“No! About that fellow, I have nothing to say! 
He played me many a dirty trick. In truth, he was 
an enemy of mine.” 

If he could not be brought to criticise that one, 
he was quick enough, when his intelligence had been 
sufficiently revived by liquor, to bestow praise or 
blame on others. 

“Baudelaire? Yes, always sitting alone, at mid- 
night, with a theatric sneer on his face, methodically 
dropping into an ice-cold crystal cup a venom that 
is going to poison no one. Gautier and Zola, the 
two extremities of human endeavor — the Mona Lisa 
and an old, dirty woman by a copyist, in imitation of 
Franz Hals. Coppee? Why, one night he seduced 
Romance up to the Butte Montmartre and there 
stabbed her in an alley. Hugo! He reminds me 
of a well-trained Russian artisan who has set him- 
self the task of covering, with every color, in every 
formal combination, the walls of a building a hun- 
dred times the size of St. Basil’s Church in Moscow.” 


NINA 


401 


Then he would stop, his head would droop for- 
ward, and his beard would rest on the soiled frill of 
his shirt. He would mutter: 

“After all, what difference? We are all sitting 
together in a dark room, blindfolded, waiting, and, 
while waiting, stringing chaplets. Suddenly we fear 
these are not pearls that we are stringing, but beads! 
We have a moment of anguish; to reassure our- 
selves, we snatch at the string. The string breaks, 
the beads patter upon the ground. But we grovel 
for them ; we bruise our fingers searching for them : 
among them there may be a pearl ! This one ? Ah, 
to see, to make sure! But a hand falls upon our 
shoulder. It is that for which we have been waiting. 
One must rise quickly, at that touch. ‘Drop your 
chaplet. Follow me.’ And we follow. Whither? 
Who knows? As we go, we hear the rest moving in 
the dark, and the industrious clicking of chaplets, 
and voices saying proudly, ‘Mine are pearls/ and 
other voices moaning, ‘Mine are beads. 

He would fall silent, with his cadaverous hands 
spread out on the table-top. 

At other times, when in the act of losing contact 
with objective things, he showed more spirit. 

To the hallucinations gathering round him he 
stretched out his arms, with a smile at once vacant 
and cunning, as if he were escaping, at the cost 
of reason, an unsatisfactory world. Sometimes, at 
night, finding himself in such a condition, he insisted 
upon a promenade. 

Resting his pointed shoulder against Felix, he 


402 


PREDESTINED 


swayed through dark streets, in plebeian parts of 
town, which were, for him, the purlieus of regions 
antipodal and ancient. “It is not far, now, to the 
gardens of Naucratis,” or, “We are nearly there: 
one can catch the sound of Phrygian flutes, and 
smell incense, ambergris, and camphor.” 

Felix, on hearing such speeches, all delivered with 
an accent of conviction, felt a thrill throughout his 
body; and, focusing his swimming senses on those 
thoughts, himself was able to respond in the same 
vein. For had not the commonplace and the monot- 
onous been swept away, so that desires previously 
grievous because no longer satiable seemed more 
imminent than reality? 

“Yes, we are nearly there. Courage; we will 
reach that place together !” 

And, arm in arm, they wandered at random 
through the darkness, striving to find the unattain- 
able. 

But the awakening was different. 

From the depths, Felix raised his eyes, to see far 
above him, as it were, a goddess of the heavens, a 
Madonna. Her unalterable aloofness clothed her in 
some of that vague splendor which is divinity’s chief 
allure for the imaginative worshipper. Indeed, he 
found it impossible, finally, to think of her as being 
like other women : his association with her had been 
too nearly idyllic to facilitate comparisons; and so 
far had the whole period receded, that he was moved, 
occasionally, when more distraught than usual, to 
question its reality. 


NINA 


403 


But, not infrequently, at thought of her his fever 
was abated, his agitation ceased, he held himself 
motionless, saying, “I will put away all this stress, 
and sit down to the thought, ‘She has loved me.’” 
He was soothed immediately, and went on contem- 
plating, in tranquil happiness, the attachment of a 
bygone time, which now had for him a charm so 
tender. 

This satisfaction was often able to pierce his most 
profound melancholy. 

Still, in those hours, now rare, when his brain 
resumed exercises wholly rational, a cynicism, ex- 
haled like an acrid vapor from all the sentimental 
ferment that he had endured, threatened to corrode 
his idol. In his career, contact had always prefaced 
disillusionment. What if her well-nigh ethereal 
singularity were visible only from afar, as is the 
remote, half phantasmal vista of a landscape which, 
at one’s approach, resolves itself into a scene resem- 
bling many others? 

He tried to drive this thought away; but, in the 
manner of every thought that he endeavored to ex- 
clude, it returned to pain him. And his heart 
cried out, “Must I lose my last ideal?” 

One evening, when he came home with such feel- 
ings, he met, in the vestibule, Mr. Quilty’s new wife, 
tastefully dressed. She had called, as it transpired 
afterward, to tell Mrs. Snatt some news that would 
have gained in detail by a delay. 

They scrutinized each other. Felix reflected: 

“So you have found the happy ending!” 


404 


PREDESTINED 


He made an effort to compliment her. 

“You look very young to-night. Your little step- 
daughters will have in you an elder sister. They 
must adore you already. How is Quilty, by the 
way ?” 

“That’s so: he mentioned the fact that you rarely 
go there now.” She added, in a whisper, “How 
glad I was to hear it!” And, looking down, she 
confessed : 

“I think I shall end by persuading him to sell his 
business.” 

“Do you know,” said Felix, “that I divined your 
nature long ago, up there? Every time I saw you 
in those surroundings I felt surprise. My intuition 
didn’t play me false in your case, at any rate.” 

They were silent, both thinking, no doubt, of the 
same woman. 

Presently, he ventured: 

“Do you ever hear of her?” 

“Now and then.” 

Montmorrissy’s extravaganza, “Poor Pierrette,” 
had been a failure at the Trocadero Theatre: Marie 
Sinjon, in the opinion of the critics, was not “up to” 
the Broadway standard. She had retired from the 
stage. Noon had married her; and, as he was in a 
serious way from nervous debility, they were travel- 
ling, by automobile, through northern Europe. 

“She, too, has her desire!” 

He entered the boarding-house. A sound of 
angry voices reached him from the “ground floor 
rear.” Through an open doorway, he saw Mrs. 


NINA 405 

Snatt and her husband engaged in one of their 
altercations. 

Felix paused on the staircase, to contemplate this 
picture. 

The drummer, with his dyed side whiskers and 
inflamed face, looking not unlike an undersized 
Spanish brigand in a red mask, sat rolling up his 
eyes in an attempt to draw from his wife’s purse by 
pathos the money that he would demand, when 
drunker, with artificial sternness. She, towering in 
a wrapper, with curl papers sticking out round her 
brow, compressed her indistinct lips and bade her 
spouse defiance. In a corner, Jennie, hugging the 
doll with taffy-colored curls, sat apathetically at 
gaze; by the window, the boy, his large head bent, 
was examining his fingers as if he had never pre- 
viously seen them; the baby, in a short dress, was 
crawling with a jolly air over a carpet full of large 
green and crimson flowers. 

Mr. Snatt, attempting to gulp down his grief, 
stammered : 

“ Nothing but cruelty and harshness . . . a man 
ain’t never understood by his wife . . . what a 
curse, this artistic temperament!” 

Fixing her with his watery eyes, he sighed: 

“It won’t be long, now! You’ll feel sorry, maybe, 
when they fish me out of the river, to-morrow 
morning.” 

“Oh, no such luck!” was the retort. 

He relapsed into silence. A baneful expression 
appeared, presently, on his splotched visage. When 
the baby crawled toward his feet, he shouted: 


406 


PREDESTINED 


“Take that brat away! I have nothing to do 
with him, d’you hear?” 

Mrs. Snatt turned, with twitching face, to look at 
her other offspring. The words burst from her : 

“That’s why he’s healthy!” 

And, her bosom heaving, she came forward to 
close the door. 

Next day, she asked Felix “if he could conven- 
iently pay up his back rent.” 

His scenarios for the kinetoscope were no longer 
accepted with enthusiasm. He had exhausted all the 
conventional situations. Besides, the manufacturer 
of moving pictures now wanted “comic skits — jaw- 
breakers.” But Felix was in no state of mind to 
invent laughable episodes. 

Though desperate for a more lucrative employ- 
ment, he was incapable of working steadily. With 
the utmost travail, he finished a page or two of 
writing, then considered that he had earned a rest. 
Finding his room a prison, and every necessary act 
a burden, he did not touch his pen till confronted by 
the most pressing need of money. Still, the twilight 
of day deliberately wasted was a melancholy hour! 

Perhaps he might be able to write a new sketch 
for the Delaclaires ? 

The Thespian regarded this idea favorably. He 
and his wife had dragged their old farce across the 
boards of vaudeville theatres so long, that generally, 
when they appeared, the audience, recognizing them 
with a hum of resignation, settled back to doze. 
There were even managers “so dead to art” as to 


NINA 


407 

refuse the couple further booking until they had 
“freshened up their act.” 

Felix sat through several performances in a Four- 
teenth Street theatre, for the purpose of studying 
their requirements. 

Into a rococo boudoir — or whatever other interior 
“set” came handy — Mrs. Delaclaire precipitated 
her large person, wearing a low-neck dress that caved 
in just below the bosom. 

She announced that “she didn’t know what to do!” 
A gentleman whom she had engaged as “leading 
man in her new tragedy” had failed to appear. 
Meanwhile, she would, at least, rehearse a song or 
two. “A song or two” was the cue for the piano- 
player, lolling in the orchestra pit. 

Encouraged by him, Mrs. Delaclaire essayed a 
ballad about “colleens,” “the gate below the 
meadows” and “the Irish moon,” concluding with 
the ear-piercing asseveration, “He will come back!” 

Thereupon, a crash of glass was heard, and Mr. 
Delaclaire entered, looking behind him, in the 
costume of a messenger boy. 

When he had explained facetiously that he was in 
the wrong house, he espied a piano in a corner. 
“Would she play a jig for him?” “What, was he a 
disciple of Terpsichore?” “Hold on! The lady had 
no right to call him names!” “But if he could 
dance, possibly he could act?” “Acting was his 
greatest pleasure.” “ How fortunate ! What a coin- 
cidence!” He took his place, and they gave a 
parody of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Then, when Mrs. 


408 


PREDESTINED 


Delaclaire had performed the sleep-walking scene 
from “Macbeth,” and Mr. Delaclaire had moaned 
forth a recitation entitled, “The Old Actor,” they 
finished in front of a drop curtain, with a lively song 
and dance, to disappear glistening with perspiration. 

The Thespian suggested that Felix “dash off” a 
more serious composition — a piece in which he 
could wear evening dress, create an atmosphere of 
wealth, say something about “other days,” and 
recover the affections of a lady who had the fashion- 
able world fawning at her feet. “You ought to be 
able to do that sort of stuff,” was Delaclaire’s con- 
clusion, with a sidelong glance. Then, rubbing his 
bristly chin reflectively, he exclaimed : 

“I’ll tell you the style! Have you seen a sketch 
called, ‘His Past’? It’s made no end of money on 
the vaudeville circuit. A dame named Nuncheon 
wrote it about a lot of swells.” 

Sometimes, arrayed in rumpled pajamas, he 
entered Felix’s room before the young man was 
awake: in the night he had “thought up an inci- 
dent that ought to go into that sketch.” His mind 
relieved of those lucubrations, the Thespian filled 
the other’s pipe, sat down on the counterpane, and 
spoke of Eddie, his son. The boy had not come 
home to sleep. Moreover, though nothing was 
missing from the Delaclaires’ apartments, he had 
been seen by Miss Vinnie Vatelle going into a pawn- 
shop. 

The soubrette had returned to town with the 
spring flowers. She was playing a short engage- 


NINA 


409 


ment in the Bon Ton Music Hall, on Eighth Avenue. 
Applause clattered round her when, in a pink dress 
reaching to the knees, pink stockings, and gilt 
dancing shoes, she uttered the refrain: 

“ I don’t care if she has yellow hair 
Or hair of. darkest black; 

I’ll take it red, piled upon her head, 

Or hanging down her back; 

I can be true to eyes of blue, 

Or eyes of gray or brown: 

I’m not hard to suit, you see, 

For it’s all the same to me 

If she just hails from New York town.” 

Her room in the boarding-house was overflowing 
with souvenirs of her successes. The walls were 
covered with photographs of Miss Vatelle in every 
variety of coiffure, in every sort of costume ranging 
between the poles of children’s dresses and tights. 
Bright-colored post-cards, scrawled over by waggish 
correspondents with all sorts of pleasantries, filled 
wire racks ; the mirror had a border of visiting cards, 
newspaper clippings, and envelopes bearing curious 
addresses; on the bureau top, amid rouge brushes, 
powder boxes, pots of cold cream, false curls, hair- 
pins, soiled handkerchiefs, and broken combs, two 
elderly faces, one male, the other female, surveyed, 
with a look of bovine self-complacency, their environ- 
ment. It was a portrait of the soubrette’s parents. 

To the young man, there was an interesting art- 
lessness about her. Living for the most part in a 
sphere of thin dressing-room walls, sleeping cars, 


4io 


PREDESTINED 


and hotel accommodations sometimes verging, neces- 
sarily, on promiscuity, she had forgotten many of the 
strictures set upon conversation in circles more con- 
ventional. Her confidences were, occasionally, as 
generous as if Felix had been an intimate relative: 
her facial expression, however, so neutralized her 
words that one could not easily find in the latter 
anything immoderate. On concluding tales of the 
provincial hotel clerk, “the baby that died,” and 
“the hard luck that a poor girl is born to,” she 
looked at him mournfully from under her pow- 
dered lashes, with her mouth relaxed, and a few 
brown freckles showing through the “make-up” on 
her short, thick nose. He got used to her perfume, 
no longer remarked her soiled shoe tops, and more 
than once forgot entirely his earlier impression of her. 

There was little to choose between his mental and 
his physical deterioration. He ate at irregular hours, 
without ever feeling hunger. Now and then, on 
approaching a mirror, he did not immediately recog- 
nize his face. He had continually a nervous agita- 
tion near the solar plexus; sudden noises made him 
start; his eyelids twitched by the hour; and it was 
not unusual for him to make his bed upon the floor, 
because of a horror, that seized him as he fell asleep, 
of falling into an abyss. 

His distress was accentuated whenever he “went 
broke.” He understood, finally, the impulse which 
drives footpads to their business. 

Mr. Pandle, meeting him in Union Square, on 
such a night, listened attentively to a rambling plaint. 


NINA 


411 

Then, raising one of his imitation eyebrows signifi- 
cantly, he inquired if Felix would care “to take a 
car ride.” 

“What for? Besides, I have the dog with me.” 

“All the better. We get on; the conductor ob- 
jects to him; we get off again. There’s the Twenty- 
third Street crosstown line, for instance. It catches 
a good transfer crowd at Broadway — theatre-goers 
from the suburbs.” 

Felix turned cold. He had an impulse to dash his 
fist into the other’s face. But, after all, he did no 
more than turn on his heel. 

Nevertheless, a few nights later, when he saw a 
stranger drop something in a deserted street, Felix 
halted, then stealthily advanced, picked up a wallet, 
made his escape. In his room, breathlessly he ex- 
amined his find. It was worn out, and empty. 

One afternoon, while he was sitting at home, 
racking his brains for some way to get money, a 
knock sounded on the door. It was Monsieur 
Pierre, who, wondering at the young man’s recent 
neglect of him, had made the journey from West 
Twenty-seventh Street. He fell into a chair, ex- 
hausted. 

“You see,” he gasped, passing a handkerchief 
over his lumpy brow, on which the veins stood out 
in knots, “thus we must gratify the habits we ac- 
quire. It is lonely over there, these days, in the 
Cafe de la Patrie.” 

He soon rose, and began to move round the 
room. 


412 


PREDESTINED 


“So you live here, eh?” he inquired, with an 
almost foolish chuckle. “Not bad, not bad! Have 
you cigarettes?” 

Standing by the bureau, he picked up, with his 
shaking fingers, the photograph of Felix’s mother. 

“Who is this?” 

When he had gazed long and earnestly at that 
portrait, he laid it gently in its place. Smoothing 
his beard, he wandered from before the bureau. 

“How do you spell your name?” he enunciated 
carefully. 

Felix, with a smile, informed him. 

“Ah!” 

The Frenchman, having reached the door, stood 
still, as if in a daze. 

“How old are you?” 

“Thirty.” 

“Where were you born?” 

“In Paris.” 

An expression of fright was stamped upon the ab- 
sinthe drinker’s face. He stumbled out into the 
corridor. 

“What an original! No doubt he is going to ex- 
plore the house!” 

But when Felix went to look for him, the corridor 
was empty, and the street door stood open. 

“Gone! This is evidently one of his bad days.” 

The same evening, Felix, while rummaging a 
bureau drawer in search of a collar not broken at 
the edges, found a cardboard box half full of head- 
ache powders. 


CHAPTER XIX 


Felix, on his next visit to West Twenty-seventh 
Street, did not see Monsieur Pierre. The cafe 
keeper shrugged his shoulders. Mme. Wargla, how- 
ever, invited the young man into the hallway. There, 
holding her dressing-gown together at the neck with 
a plump, dingy hand, she scrutinized the caller 
earnestly. 

“He is not able to receive his friends.” 

“Then he’s ill?” 

“He is always ill. Besides, at times he has curi- 
ous notions. One does not live that life — you under- 
stand. We pay, hein? As the saying goes, 'each 
pleasure costs a thousand pains.’” 

“You quote Francois Villon, Madame?” cried 
Felix, in astonishment. 

Her face lost some of its churlishness, as she 
replied : 

“Eh, like all the young and well-favored, you 
think the old and ugly have always been so. When 
one has been smothered in gold dust by the improvi- 
dent, a grain or two may stick long afterward.” 

But a bell jangled, and she went to hold parley 
at the front door. 

“Oui, oui , oui! Entrez .” 

There entered a delicate-looking youth with an 
413 


414 


PREDESTINED 


incipient mustache and the trace of a bifurcated 
chin beard. On seeing another, he hesitated; then, 
affecting a bold air, he leaped up the staircase. 
Mme. Wargla resumed her scrutiny of Felix. 

4 ‘How comes it that you speak French so well, 
Monsieur?” 

“That language has always interested me.” 

A sound of creaking boards reached them from 
the rear end of the corridor. 

“Well, as I have told you once, he is able to see 
no one ! What more can I say ? Are you satisfied ? 
Good-by, Monsieur!” 

And she slammed the front door. 

A week later, returning to West Twenty-seventh 
Street at an unusual hour, Felix discovered him in 
the alcove of the Cafe de la Patrie. Monsieur 
Pierre set down his half-empty goblet, as the other 
exclaimed : 

“My dear friend, how glad I am to see you 
recovered! Maybe it was partly selfish, that con- 
cern of mine ? I have missed our expeditions to the 
Latin Quarter, our evenings in the Cafe Francois 
Premier, not to mention our association with Xenoph- 
anes and Empedocles.” 

“I, too,” was the low response. 

“But we shall resume those hours?” 

The Parisian raised timidly his large, vague eyes, 
which seemed about to overflow into their encir- 
cling rings of reddish brown. 

“Yes, yes; why not? By all means. We shall 
not deprive ourselves of that!” 


NINA 


415 

“Two absinthes,” called Felix, to the cafe keeper. 

So their companionship was resumed. 

Those were days of early summer, when the first 
intense heat brought forth, simultaneously with the 
geraniums in public parks, light-colored, filmy 
dresses, bright parasols, palm-leaf fans, and straw 
hats which an army of punctilious toilers had not 
presumed to wear until the day appointed by some 
forgotten arbiter of style. In fashionable parts of 
town the doorways of dwelling houses were boarded 
over; in the principal thoroughfares, trenches 
swarmed with Italian laborers; everywhere dirt, 
pulverized by the sunshine, whirled toward the cor- 
nices in clouds ; and the fumes of sewer gas mingled 
with street smells accentuated by the humidity. 
Then, round the Cafe de la Patrie, fat foreigners 
appeared without coats, in wilted collars, bareheaded 
women wheeled perambulators wherein babies rest- 
lessly kicked up their naked legs, garbage buckets 
remained too long at the curb, while few windows 
thereabouts lacked their tableaux of dishabille that 
bordered on indiscretion. In the rear of the cafe, 
an intermittent breeze wafted through the barred 
window odors of sour wine lees from the mass of 
empty bottles in the yard; and the ailantus tree 
dipped its long leaves above a scabrous wooden 
fence which radiated too effectively the prevailing 
warmth. 

They sat in the alcove, smoking cigarettes, and 
staring at the two goblets. The sunlight, stealing 
across the table top, finally pierced the absinthe, to 


416 


PREDESTINED 


wake in that fluid a soft, nacreous splendor. There, 
straightway, was a cup glowing with fires of a subtle 
and unearthly beauty — a chalice brimming with 
enchantment. Their fingers embraced the glass 
with a tenderness almost voluptuous; the bland 
concoction trickled down their throats: and, pres- 
ently, the lustre of that essence seemed shed on the 
surroundings — as a refulgence from the Grail, so 
one is told, transfigured the dark walls of its hiding 
place. 

But the complexion of their intercourse had un- 
dergone a change. 

The young man missed that sense of spiritual 
intimacy which had first attracted him to the 
Parisian. He had become less the listener, and 
more the talker; his revelations of temperament 
were now met by silence more often than by con- 
currence; and occasionally, when he had finished 
some rambling speech about “the only means 
whereby the inadequacy of the actual world might 
be evaded,” a silence fell between them, as depress- 
ing as if freighted with an enormous sadness. The 
elder, passing a tremulous hand before his eyes, 
would stammer: 

“Let us not stay here any longer.” 

Thereupon, to Felix’s dissatisfaction, they would 
go out, to walk the dusky streets. 

Soon, however, Monsieur Pierre, who had been 
wont on other evenings so swiftly to traverse space, 
was forced to a standstill by exhaustion. Under an 
arc lamp, slowly he removed his black felt hat. 


NINA 


417 


Large drops of perspiration trickled down his 
temples, over a vermiculate network of distended 
veins. 

“Lend me your shoulder, Felix. Let us turn 
back. ,, 

And, at the foot of Mme. Wargla’s steps, he bade 
the young man good-night. 

“You are going home now?” 

“I suppose so.” 

“Good, very good. Home and to bed. That is 
the best. I, too. Au revoir” 

“He is changed since his illness,” thought Felix. 

But once, after making a pretence of departure, the 
young man stepped into a doorway. He was re- 
warded by seeing the absinthe drinker descend the 
thirteen steps, cross the street, and re-enter the cafe. 

“So it’s a trick! He is tired of my company?” 

He determined never again to set foot in the Cafe 
de la Patrie. 

But five days later, the Frenchman accomplished 
the journey to Felix’s abode. 

“What!” he ejaculated, while holding fast to the 
door jamb, in order to catch his breath. “You are 
up and about; you are as well as ever! Then it is 
because you no longer find anything of interest over 
there.” 

“On the contrary, because I thought that you 
preferred it so.” 

“Why?” 

Felix, unwilling to confess his espionage, replied: 

“An impression cannot always be expressed.” 


418 


PREDESTINED 


At these words, delivered in a chilly manner, an 
agitation seized upon the Parisian. Sitting down in 
the nearest chair, he mopped his head distractedly 
with a handkerchief. 

11 Mon Dieu ! Are we going to quarrel, you and I ? ” 

By that speech the young man’s heart was imme- 
diately touched. 

“ Forgive me! I ask nothing better than to con- 
tinue a relationship unique, for me, in this — that it 
is perfectly congenial.” 

“ Embrassons nous ! 11 

And Monsieur Pierre would not be denied the 
satisfaction of saluting Felix with a kiss on either 
cheek. 

Thereafter, he returned frequently to the boarding- 
house in Thirteenth Street. 

He insisted on examining every article that the 
other had got published. Displaying a sort of 
trepidation, he received into his arms the books of 
clippings, the sheaves of manuscript, all the literary 
souvenirs of a period signalized by self-confidence. 
With a pile of torn magazines balanced on his knees, 
he deciphered, word by word, the English prose. 
Occasionally he paused, with a look as if he himself 
had accomplished something admirable. 

“Ah! Ah! There is a thought, charmingly ex- 
pressed, that I have not met before!” 

“Let me see it ... . Did I write so well?” 

“It is not for a young man to say such things!” 

The Frenchman approached the window. There, 
standing beside the bureau, with his thin shoulders 


NINA 


419 


bent forward, he gazed out, apparently, on the back 
yards. 

He haunted Felix, did this old wreck with the 
crapulous body and the head of a mystic who has 
lain desiccating for centuries in Roman catacombs. 
Invariably, his mournful eyes brightened at sight 
of the young man ; he reached out a hand to pat the 
other’s arm; he assumed, in fact, an air that was a 
caricature of the paternal. And, in the paternal man- 
ner, he commenced to bestow on Felix good advice. 

But the words “ resolution, ” “ continence, ” and 
“emancipation” fell inaptly from his lips; a salu- 
tary philosophy, which he, erstwhile so eloquent in 
cynical discourse, developed as if expressly for his 
companion’s benefit, had all the speciousness of a 
creed promulgated by an unbeliever; a quotation 
to the effect that “the object of life was, after all, 
the education of the will,” obtained, because he 
uttered it, the flavor of a sorry jest. The result 
of all the Frenchman’s feeble homilies was Felix’s 
thought, “If he is, indeed, sincere in this, if, thanks 
to growing intimacy, one has finally perceived the 
secret yearnings of his soul, what a mockery is 
human aspiration!” 

Nevertheless, Monsieur Pierre continued to harp 
on that tune, but with variations somewhat more 
practical. 

While visiting the young man, he ignored all sug- 
gestions that they sally forth to “have a drink”; in 
the Cafe de la Patrie, he made anything a pretext to 
“take the air.” They had arguments, in tenor 


420 


PREDESTINED 


verging on acerbity, before swinging doors of glass; 
Felix was drawn by the arm past many a saloon; 
when a cafe sign appeared ahead, Monsieur Pierre, 
with a quivering forefinger, designated some inter- 
esting object across the way. But, at every ap- 
proach to dram shops, the feet of both began to lag; 
two pairs of eyes turned furtively askance; and the 
appetent expression of the one was mirrored in the 
visage of the other. Thus walking the streets — 
from which, because of these pedestrians’ sobriety, 
all interest had been withdrawn — each found, no 
doubt, the other’s company a burden. Felix, for 
his part, was bored, exasperated, and disgusted, so 
that the Parisian had to endure not only the discom- 
fort of desires unappeased, but also the ill-nature of a 
cherished comrade. 

Indeed, excursions of this sort reduced him to 
a pitiable state. Worn out by unwonted exercise, 
beside himself from lack of customary stimulation, 
rendered, moreover, half imbecile by the depression 
of his mind, he gave in, finally, with a groan. They 
retraced their steps to West Twenty-seventh Street. 
On the threshold of Mme. Wargla’s house Felix 
went through the stale burlesque of seeing his com- 
panion safe indoors. 

“And you, Felix?” 

“Oh, I, like you, am for bed.” 

The absinthe drinker, rallying for a last effort his 
expiring will, made his appeal in broken accents: 

“Come, while I believe you, something might 
happen; so let us make sure. Let us swear a little 


NINA 


421 


oath together, eh? Even by our hope of heaven, 
by all saintly intercessors, by the Virgin ? No, one 
breaks such oaths too easily. By what? Tiens, 
you will swear to me by the memory of Madame 
your mother?” 

“My poor friend, I have no memory of my 
mother.” 

Then, as Monsieur Pierre continued to stare at 
him, he added, with a return of gentleness: 

“Rest assured, I shall go straight home.” 

He no longer waited in a near-by doorway, so con- 
fident was he that, when his back was turned, the 
Parisian would scramble down the steps and make 
for the Cafe de la Patrie. 

“He means well enough: it is, of course, a proof 
that he is fond of me. But as if such hocus pocus 
could effect what I have tried so desperately to 
accomplish!” 

One night, after such a departure, having got 
himself thoroughly intoxicated elsewhere, he wan- 
dered back to West Twenty-seventh Street. In the 
alcove of the cafe, he found Monsieur Pierre enjoy- 
ing a condition at least no less elevated than his own. 

When the Frenchman had succeeded in focusing 
his gaze upon the new arrival, he gave vent to a 
vacant laugh. 

“You are late! Where have you been, all day? 
Have you ever seen the treasure house of the Sas- 
sanian kings, in the heart of an unknown jungle, 
'split open to the moon? There rubies and em- 
eralds speak to one another of the secret sins of 


422 


PREDESTINED 


long-dead begums; square sapphires that have 
mirrored the eyes of monarchs devour with their 
scintillations, still thus infected, the white skins of 
pearls that peris wore; the topaz and the chrys- 
oprase, the diamond and the chalcedony, once 
learned, through many centuries, in marble pavilions 
inlaid with arabesques of pietra dura , a variant of 
royal procreation: their spawn is a blended miracle 
of light — but, over all, there hovers to this day a 
mist of blood.” While speaking, he was looking 
out through the window, to where moonshine, pass- 
ing between the leaves of the ailantus tree, glinted 
on the heaps of empty bottles. 

From materials apparently as slight they could 
construct, at such moments, the fabric of their most 
entrancing dreams. A street, a building, a figure, a 
chain of arc lamps, or a fall of shadows, suggested, 
then, a picture wholly strange and, in suggesting it, 
produced it. As each visionary, moreover, sure of 
comprehension, immediately related his perceptions 
to the other, in nearly every scene developed by the 
overtaxed imagination of either they were able to 
participate. 

That night, under cover of an opalescent haze, 
places familiar to them turned extraordinary; forms 
took mysterious shapes about them ; the air of other 
worlds caressed their faces. The street lights 
changed readily to flaming cressets; the windows 
one and all unrolled long draperies of cloth of gold; 
and over pavements deep with flowers moved capar- 
isoned chargers, heralds blowing fanfares, and, after 


NINA 


423 


them, pell-mell, a river of damask, steel, precious 
stones, chiselled ivory, and velvet banners, amid 
which, in a white hand heavy with ecclesiastical 
finger rings, quivered the Golden Rose. The pair 
doffed their hats, with mocking smiles, to a caval- 
cade of work-horses, bound for sale, rope halters 
round their jaws, and ragged stable boys astride 
their backs. 

So it was Rome: the Borgias’ palace blazed with 
light; robes rushed across bridges; blonde damsels 
with jewelled foreheads leaned insidiously from case- 
ments, and an odor of musk was stirred into the soft 
air at the swift passage of cardinals tricked out, like 
revellers, in violet-colored masks. The two, rais- 
ing their voices, implored the casement dwellers: 
“Maddalena! Angelica! Pomona! Drop down, if 
not the key, at least a kiss!” They moved on, how- 
ever, when threatened with an appeal to the police. 

It was Corinth: the salt waves lapped the prows 
of Punic galleys; a faint murmur issued from the 
Temple of Venus Pandemos; and, on the windy 
quay, one wept to see an old drunken woman turn 
up a face which had belonged, when fair, to Lai's. 
“ Where was her statue, fashioned by Myron,” they 
asked her, grinning through their tears. “What 
had become of Diogenes and Aristippus?” — Nor 
did they cease till flooded with scurrility in a dia- 
lect at least not Corinthian. 

It was Troy: and Helen was in yonder “topless 
tower,” gazing out, with who could tell what reveries, 
toward the camp fires of the Greeks. 


424 


PREDESTINED 


But as Papal Rome shredded into the common- 
place, and the salt breeze swept away the classic 
glamour from warehouses and moored schooners, so 
Helen’s tower, when approached too closely, became 
a “sky-scraper.” Perhaps the night air somewhat 
cleared, at last, the absinthe drinker’s brain. He 
muttered : 

“Reality is hanging the very sky in mourning 
weeds, against the burial of Romance. Let me, too, 
be buried, as a figment no more substantial.” And 
presently, quoting from Empedocles: 

“‘Men, wrestling through a little space of life that 
is no life, whirled off like a vapor by a quick fate, 
flit away.’ ” 

Then, turning up his eyes: 

“Yet in my time, I have lived a hundred lives, to 
discover the especial thrill of each. I have soared — 
ah, and I have fallen! But I was wrong to think 
that I had sounded every depth.” 

At the Frenchman’s door, Mme. Wargla, roused from 
slumber, turned on Felix with the ferocity of a tigress. 

“So, the cafe is not enough: when that is closed, 
you must drag him through the streets! Look at 
him, now, asleep against the jamb! Belle affaire! 
His clothes: cristi, what a mess! And he who was 
so spick and span — no Bohemian, but a gentleman 
of the grand world. There, poor old boy, come 
in. Didst thou find out who cared most for thee, 
in the end? Thou wilt be ill enough to-morrow. 
As for you, Monsieur, cut your stick!” 

Felix found his way home. 


NINA 


425 


It was not thought that Mrs. Snatt’s boarding- 
house could last much longer. Half the rooms were 
empty, while most of the lodgers now preferred to 
eat their meals elsewhere. But often, in the even- 
ing, Mr. Snatt’s snare-drum could be heard rattling 
downstairs. He was remaining, this time, evi- 
dently, to play the dirge. 

One morning, Delia, the housemaid, appeared 
before Felix with a frightened look. After rubbing 
her broken shoes together in embarrassment, she 
managed to get out the information that her mistress 
had an opportunity, which she could not afford to 
lose, to rent the room. As he owed, at that time, 
for five weeks’ board, the young man’s consternation 
was quickly followed by relief. 

The Delaclaires insisted on giving him a “ send- 
off.” A delicatessen shop furnished the collation, 
which was composed of sardines, Italian sausage, 
rye bread, pickled pigs’ feet, Swiss cheese, and 
beer. From this beverage, Mrs. Delaclaire obtained 
a certain sentimentality: her bosom heaved above 
her caved-in corsets; she spoke, in moving tones, of 
“ties made but to be broken,” and “auld lang syne.” 
The Thespian, not to be outdone, recollected a few 
appropriate quotations; and, at the last, summon- 
ing to his assistance a melancholy and decrepit look, 
declaimed, with that intonation called a dying fall: 

“ Bid me farewell, and smile. I pray you, come. 
While I remain above the ground, you shall 
Hear from me still; and never of me aught 
But what is like me formerly.” 


426 


PREDESTINED 


Miss Vinnie Vatelle was unable to be present at 
that ceremony. The soubrette was confined to her 
room by a “sick headache.” 

Next morning, Mrs. Snatt came out of the “ground 
floor rear” to bid him good-by. Blushing, she 
fixed him with appealing eyes. Apparently, in her 
belief, not he, but she, had cause to plead excuses. 

Felix declared that he would not forget her. 

“At the earliest possible moment, you shall have 
your thirty dollars.” 

“It’s not that. But we can’t always do as we 
would like. I’m sorry. You sort o’ gave the house 
a tone.” 

Jennie even insisted on a kiss. The baby, a 
marvel of intelligence for his age, achieved the 
words “Da — da!” and “Doggie!” Willie, his large 
head cocked, stared at these demonstrations as if 
some mysterious perfidy were going on. 

From the end of the street, Felix, looking back, 
saw Delia on the doorstep. Her hair was in wild 
confusion ; one hand shaded her eyes ; an angular 
elbow glinted in the sunlight. 

He went to a hotel in Houston Street — a nine- 
story, white-brick structure with a projecting roof — 
which an altruist had built for the decent and cheap 
accommodation of men. 

Marble staircases and floors, walls of white tiling, 
elevators, and an administration bureau fitted out in 
oak, gave the young man, at his first glance, encour- 
agement. But the bedchambers, each furnished 
with a narrow cot, a chair, a locker, and a strip of 


NINA 


427 

rug, were small as cells; the dining-room had long 
tables like those used in public institutions; and 
the shower baths were all situated downstairs. A 
night’s lodging, however, could be obtained for 
thirty cents; and a meal was elaborate which cost 
more than a quarter of a dollar. On the other hand, 
one was forbidden to occupy his room from nine 
in the morning until five in the afternoon, dogs were 
excluded, and no liquor was dispensed. 

Felix, confiding Pat, every night, to an attendant 
in the basement, remained there for some weeks: 
it was a place to sleep. In courts, nine stories high, 
white and glistening, roofed with glass, old men of 
boundless leisure, seated at square tables, played 
checkers interminably; in the library on the second 
floor, others turned languidly the pages of“Ivan- 
hoe” or “Lorna Doone”; and Felix, when entering 
the lavatory for his morning bath, often saw honest- 
looking fellows rinsing undershirts and handker- 
chiefs at stationary washtubs provided for that 
purpose. 

In time, the restrictions which obtained in the 
hotel, his loneliness, at night, for Pat, and the long 
faces that greeted him when he came home intoxi- 
cated, drove Felix to seek other quarters. He in- 
habited hostelries over cafes, where the carpets 
were covered with spots, the window-curtains torn, 
and the beds dirty; he made the rounds of lodging- 
houses “ catering to a transient trade”; he dealt 
with hotel proprietors and landladies who surrounded 
their untidy persons with an atmosphere of mystery. 


428 


PREDESTINED 


Those were domiciles full of battered furniture, 
broken washstands, door-knobs quick to turn in the 
hands of strangers who had “mistaken the number.” 
His homeward road lay through streets by day alive 
with Jewish clothing makers, fruit-laden push carts, 
Italian brats, “kosher” restaurants — at night de- 
serted save, perhaps, for some one lurking in the 
shadow of an entry, a policeman on his beat, or a 
drab skirt disappearing over puddles. He had 
come into a place where factories squeezed between 
their walls the ramshackle dwellings of an earlier 
period, where street lamps seemed to burn less 
brightly than elsewhere and the windows to give 
forth a sheen more wan, where, high over excava- 
tions, there remained large squares of wall-paper, 
pallid in moonlight — the blanched backgrounds of 
forgotten scenes enacted in the rooms of houses 
finally razed. 

His address was known to Monsieur Pierre, who 
sometimes, smoothing his beard in agitation, stam- 
mered : 

“I do not ask you to live in my house.” 

But he now insisted on loaning the other small 
amounts of money. 

Such transactions, at first made difficult by a 
squeamishness which neither wanted to exhibit, soon 
became easy. It was, in fact, the Parisian — at 
what cost to his self-indulgence Felix did not vent- 
ure to surmise — who kept the young man’s head 
above water. 

To others whom he chanced to meet, Felix 


NINA 


429 

answered that he was “ living with some friends 
uptown.” 

On Fourteenth Street, one afternoon in October, 
at a stentorious halloo he turned to see the Thespian, 
posing beside a poster, of late overlooked by the bill- 
stickers, that portrayed him. They shook hands. 
Mr. Delaclaire remarked that Felix looked very bad. 

Mrs. Snatt, it seemed, was now “on her last legs.” 
But there was no chance of the ex-drummer dying: 
“he was too thoroughly pickled.” “Such fortunate 
situations, my dear boy, only happen on the stage.” 

As for the Delaclaires, they were, just for the 
moment, “at liberty.” And lowering his jowls in a 
regretful manner upon a frayed cravat, the actor 
said: 

“By the way, we never done that sketch!” 

“That’s true.” 

Felix changed the subject. 

“What of Vinnie?” 

“On the road again. Always working! A nice 
little thing, don’t you think ? She used to talk a lot 
about you, after you left.” 

“And Edwin Booth Delaclaire?” 

Gloom pervaded the Thespian’s Neronic counte- 
nance. 

“That boy will be the death of me!” 

He had even been arrested, on the charge of 
throwing a brick through a jeweller’s window as a 
preliminary to stealing some gold-plated watches. 
Though the blame had been fastened on his com- 
panions, the youth had not escaped without leaving 


430 


PREDESTINED 


his picture in the “ Rogues’ Gallery ” at Police Head- 
quarters. 

“You understand? It makes him a marked man 
for life. If only there was a way to get it out!’' 

Felix promised to petition “a friend of his on the 
force.” 

With this in mind, he took the trouble to wait in 
Quilty’s saloon for the detective. The saloon keeper 
had become the father of a son. He asked Felix 
what college was the best. 

Connla came in. Pat’s condition put him, at 
once, in a bad humor: “He had never seen a good 
bull-terrier so run down!” When Felix broached 
the object of his visit, the detective answered: 

“Better leave that boy alone: you’ll only dirty 
your fingers. One of these days, he’ll be wheeling 
a barrow full of rocks, like Pandle.” 

Then, sucking his teeth reflectively, he added: 

“Yestiday, I seen your friend the dope fiend go- 
ing into Chinatown. Faith, I could read fine print 
through him! He’ll not see the winter out, and 
that’s the truth.” 

“So near the end of his rope,” thought Felix. 
“And what of me?” 

Every day, he advanced farther into an opacity 
which hid, as it were, the simultaneous approach 
of something terrible. A feeling of material un- 
reality had so increased in him that he gazed some- 
times at his hands to find them strange, while his 
voice often sounded in his ears as if issuing from 
another’s lips. The city had become a place of half 


NINA 


43 1 

a dozen familiar points: these, shrouded continually 
in a sort of mist, no longer represented anything 
important. His capacity for feeling, when in his 
sober senses, delicate or deep emotions, seemed 
dead; he could no longer call forth either violent or 
gentle impulses; his thoughts of Nina were dis- 
tinguished only by sadness, as fleeting as the 
shadow of great wings, because he had lost, in that 
respect, the power to evoke a sweet regret. It was 
as if an inner intelligence had crumbled there, leav- 
ing no more than a fragile shell. This, scarcely able 
to bear the most trivial frictions, was liable, at any 
hour, to disintegrate. 

One afternoon, early in November, he set out, by 
way of Sixth Avenue, for the Cafe de la Patrie. 

It was a day of lowering clouds, of cold winds, of 
livid window-panes and dejected faces. The en- 
compassing depression of nature penetrated his 
heart: how desolate the world, for all the footfalls 
round him! 

Those footfalls accompanied his own; they in- 
truded on his dejection; when he listened to them, 
they became the tread of a multitude, amid which 
he was lost, and by which he was being borne along 
to an unknown destination. 

He raised his eyes to the housetops. 

Tall, dull against the gloomy sky, slowly they 
changed their altitudes before his gaze: those in 
front were seen to rise, and those behind to sink 
gradually from view. It was a descent. The mul- 
titude was flowing, like a stream, down hill. 


43 2 


PREDESTINED 


It flowed past columns black and straight, all 
alike, interminably reiterated. From time to time, 
a sound as of thunder burst forth overhead, at which 
the columns seemed to shake, as do tree trunks at 
the breaking of a storm. Were they not, indeed, 
tree trunks? They had that aspect. They were 
innumerable tree trunks gathering on the outskirts 
of a forest as tenebrous as oblivion. 

Between them the human stream continued to 
flow downward. 

He examined his company. 

There pressed round him countless wayfarers with 
eyes fixed straight ahead. Save for their rapt ex- 
pressions, they displayed a bewildering dissimi- 
larity. 

Some showed through tatters their emaciated 
flanks; to the shoulders of others hung strips of 
rotten mail; the rags of sacerdotal fillets dangled 
over the transparent temples of a few; and amid 
naked bodies, both tender and withered, all frail 
and covered with old scars, appeared, here and 
there, the muddy remnant of a purple robe. Senile 
old men in grave clothes, wearing a wreck of laurel 
leaves, rested their weight on youths whose lips were 
covered with a green froth of poison. Blind women, 
from whose necks were slipping sacred amulets, sup- 
ported girls with bleeding breasts, their cheeks well 
nigh washed clear of paint by tears. Fathers, trans- 
fixed by rusty swords, still dragged along their life- 
less children; and one who had been, perhaps, a 
king stumbled onward, though decapitated, hugging 


NINA 


433 

against his breast a head that wore a crown bereft 
of all its jewels. 

Melancholy murmurs, sobs, moans, and snuffling 
rose from this host, to blend in a diapason like the 
sea’s. He knew, at last, the source of those super- 
natural voices which had long haunted him. 

But the shadows deepened; the tree trunks were 
multiplied; the stream had penetrated the forest. 
And, forthwith, all that company, with brandished 
arms and heads thrown back, melted, by a hundred 
paths, into the darkness. 

Running forward, he cried: 

“Must I stay here?” 

A hand dragged him back. He was in the grasp 
of a tall spectre, decked with plates of silver, but 
beneath the visor of whose helmet no face appeared. 

“They have all left me here alone!” 

“I’ll take you to where there’s lots of them,” 
was the reply. 

He fell upon this guardian’s neck with tears of 
gratitude. 

His trust was not ill bestowed: for presently the 
threnody of mournful voices fell again upon his ears. 

He listened to tales related by invisible mourners — 
of marriage beds covered with a pall, of treasure 
trove grasped finally by the dying, of love that 
stood smiling beyond an abyss perceived too late, 
of diadems from which the fangs of snakes whipped 
forth. As he heard these various accounts of baffled 
lives, he set them all down, word by word, upon 
an endless scroll. 


434 


PREDESTINED 


Once, a voice reached him : 

“This is an interesting case.” 

And, when he paused in his labor, he was asked: 

“Why do you move your forefinger, day and 
night, as if you were writing?” 

He replied: 

“I am copying everything I hear: all the grief 
of the world shall be in my pages. Then I shall bum 
the book at the foot of a great altar; and the words 
shall fly up like little flames, to warm the heart of an 
angelic figure that sits overhead. But if I am sly 
enough to slip my own grief in among the others, it 
shall fly aloft like the rest, mingled with them; and 
the angelic presence, confused by so many flames, 
may feel for me also.” 

His questioner laughed gently. 

“An educated man is sometimes able to get up a 
very picturesque D. T.” 

One morning, when he had been at his task “for 
centuries,” he saw above him a ceiling of stamped 
metal that recalled the Cafe de la Patrie. He 
turned his head on a pillow. He was in a hospital. 

In a long room were aligned against white walls 
a score of iron beds, all occupied by men. The 
rough chins of these invalids were upturned; their 
ignoble faces were flooded by the sunshine, and 
the same stupor seemed to dull every pair of eyes. 
Here and there moved orderlies, in white jackets 
and black trousers. By the door, a physician — a 
bland youth, clad in a suit of duck, with yellow 
hair and spectacles — was pressing the point of a 


NINA 


435 


hypodermic syringe into the shoulder of an old, 
idiotic-looking waif who leaned forward, on his 
mattress, in a sitting posture. 

The physician, when he had finished the opera- 
tion, came over to Felix. Seating himself on the 
bed, he inquired, with an amiable grin: 

“How do you find yourself?” 

“Where am I?” 

“Well, if you must know, in the alcoholic ward.” 

Felix lowered his eyelids, to escape the other’s smile. 

“How long have I been here?” 

“Three days. My dear fellow, I have to tell you 
that you’ve had a serious time. You are full to the 
neck with bromides and ergot — so, of course, you 
feel depressed. All the same, I take this opportu- 
nity to read you a lecture. One man has died in 
this room since you came into it. Perhaps you 
would not have got off so easily without special care. 
We did our best for you. To be frank, patients of 
your class don’t come in here often.” 

“Many thanks,” said Felix, with an effort. “But 
when shall I get out?” 

“To-morrow, probably.” 

All day, he lay abed, watching his neighbors. 

Their large, rough hands, spread out on the 
coverlets, twitched from time to time; their heavy 
eyes rolled slowly in discolored sockets; some dis- 
played on their foreheads the violet-colored marks 
of blows, and a negro had his face so thoroughly 
bandaged that only his nose and mouth appeared. 
From between their restless lips, they puffed out, 


PREDESTINED 


436 

occasionally, low exclamations, incomprehensible 
phrases, fragments of querulous complaints. Or 
else, peering intently at the ceiling, those most re- 
cently arrived cried out in fear; and one, whose 
arms and legs were bound to his bedstead, expressed 
continually a belief that he was going to have his 
throat cut. He shrank back, with the look of an 
animal at bay, whenever an orderly approached 
him carrying a hypodermic syringe. 

At nightfall, their condition grew worse. 

From one corner rose a sound of weeping; else- 
where an unnatural chuckle was repeated at inter- 
vals; sharp ejaculations resounded: “Officer, stop 
that man ! ” “That’s how they killed him ! ” “Your 
honor, it wasn’t me!” “When it sticks its head 
out, shoot quick!” “I am in hell,” thought Felix, 
and himself began to sob. The young physician 
injected morphine into his arm. He fell asleep. 

Next afternoon, he was “discharged as cured.” 

On legs that bent under him at every step, he 
issued into the sunlight. A large rectangle of gray 
buildings surrounded him: in this enclosure stood 
some leafless trees; and, beyond these, on iron 
galleries rising in tiers against stone walls, one saw 
convalescents sitting in bed gowns of faded blue. 
To the right, a gate appeared. He was let out, by 
a watchman, into the street. 

A white bull-terrier sprang at him with a whine, 
and Monsieur Pierre came hurrying forward. 

The Parisian did nothing save wipe his eyes and 
press the young man’s arm. 


NINA 


437 

“But,” faltered Felix, trying to collect his senses, 
“how did you find me?” 

That had been due to Pat. Monsieur Pierre, 
searching everywhere for Felix, making, finally, the 
rounds of all the hospitals, had found the dog at 
this gate. Grimy, half starved, and fierce, Pat had 
attempted, whenever any one passed in or out, to 
penetrate the enclosure. He had been pelted with 
stones; and when the Frenchman arrived, the gate- 
keeper was consulting with a policeman as to the 
advisability of putting a bullet into the brute’s head. 

“I took him home. It was not easy: I got a bite 
or two. But he was fed — yes, indeed, on the best. 
And ever since, we have come here, twice a day, to 
wait.” 

He added, in beseeching tones, 

“It is all over now, is it not? It is the end of 
all that?” 

“Yes; I have learned my lesson.” 

“Let us pray to that effect.” 

The hospital was situated near the East River. 
They turned westward, and, at a slow pace, passed 
between tenements. But where were they going? 

Not to the cafe, or to Mme. Wargla’s house; not 
to Quilty’s saloon, or to Felix’s mean room! 

“Monsieur Pierre, I am grateful for your solici- 
tude and your kindness to the dog. But there are 
times when one should be alone. Maybe I shall 
feel better in Central Park.” 

The other, looking down, at last nodded. 

“You are right, no doubt.” 


PREDESTINED 


4 3 8 

Before departing, he slipped ten dollars into the 
young man’s hand. 

“Let us say that this money shall now come to 
good uses.” 

And he shuffled away, with his hands clasped 
behind him, and his black felt hat tipped forward. 

Felix found himself too weak to walk uptown. 
His dog, however, would not be permitted in a 
trolley-car. He hailed a hansom cab. 

The cab driver, leaning down from his perch, 
inquired : 

“And who’s to pay for the trip?” 

Without animosity, Felix displayed the banknotes. 

At Central Park West and Seventy-ninth Street 
he left the cab. An entrance to the park was there. 
He went in. 

The day was clear and cold. The sunshine had 
never been more brilliant. 


CHAPTER XX 


At this entrance to the park, a path, taking up 
its eastward course, crossed a bridge with granite 
parapets. Beneath the arch thus formed, some 
thirty feet below, meandered north and south a 
bridle path. Felix paused by the northern parapet 
to look down at the equestrians. 

Now and then, they appeared unexpectedly below, 
on bay horses: rising clear of their saddles, they 
departed rapidly up the incline of the perspective. 

A hundred yards ahead, the gray flow of the 
bridle path was cut in twain by an islet, so to speak, 
of twiggy trees. Behind, extended a skyline, pur- 
plish and undulating, of commingled branches. 

The riders, turning to the right, skirted the islet, 
to vanish amid bare thickets. But, on the left, 
others came swiftly into sight, approached at a trot, 
grew larger. Their white stocks, and the bits of 
their steeds, became discernible; their faces were 
soon hidden by their hats; the horses’ backs were 
elongated; the cropped tails disappeared beneath 
the bridge. 

He recalled the period when he had ridden so 
with Nina. 

For the first time in many months the tremor of 
his nerves and the confusion of his mind had ceased : 
as he gazed through air that seemed more limpid 

439 


440 


PREDESTINED 


than a celestial ether, he seemed to be sinking into 
absolute serenity. Round him a horizon of soft 
tree tops supported the edges of a flawless sky: the 
earth commingled with the heavens, and part of the 
golden brilliancy shed upon the ground floated 
upward immediately to its source. How beautiful 
this world, of which he was a part! Languidly he 
closed his eyes, the better to appreciate the purity 
of nature’s exhalation. He was a boy again — the 
memory of past transgressions blurred, so that there 
remained to him only a vague wonder at the mystery 
of the sun, of the whispering grasses, and of the 
answering heart. 

Ah, to have such feelings always, always to have 
had them! He remembered well the spot where he 
had parted from them. 

It was not hard, perhaps, to keep the heart bright 
on hilltops where sweet breezes blew, and flowers 
blossomed, and sunlit vistas stretched far away to 
meet the sea? 

But for youth, alas, the immaculateness of hill- 
tops did not suffice. From such eminences did one 
not glimpse, at a twilight that was like all other 
twilights thereabouts, a distant flash, a beacon 
burning who knew where, a flame “that might sur- 
mount for one the Pharos?” So down from the 
summit, in the gathering darkness, to adventure far, 
with beating heart — through fields and cities, past 
palaces and hovels, till, at last, lost and fainting in 
black alley-ways, one said: “What I sought was 
never here; but it was always there.” 


NINA 


441 


He felt, however, no acute regret. His melan- 
choly was so calm as to seem to him, after his long 
turbulence, pleasant. It was enough for him that 
he had regained, from abstinence without desire, 
from sedative medicines, or otherwise, the power of 
extracting enjoyment from the slightest materials. 
He could have shed tears, in weak happiness, at the 
aspect of the distant skyline. As he turned from 
the parapet, he paused to gaze tenderly at the 
withered petals of a bush. 

He descended the path which led into the park. 

A broad driveway appeared before him; beyond, 
was spread out a lake. The water, of a leaden hue 
close by, soon changed to a steel blue that joined, 
at length, in soft encroachments overlaid with scin- 
tillations, the olive-green reflection of a distant shore. 
There saplings, which began to rise directly from 
the water’s edge, were gilded by the declining sun: 
in their upper branches was caught a fulvous haze; 
and between them one could see bare earth — in 
color a rich and luminous brown where not transected 
by long shadows — sloping upward till it vanished 
reluctantly behind the lowest horizontal limbs. 
Overhead, the eastern sky, too mellow to be blue, 
too azure to be yellow, trembled as if at contempla- 
tion of the radiant west. 

Crossing the driveway, he walked north until he 
saw, on the right, a wooden bridge that spanned a 
little inlet from the lake. 

The banks descended abruptly; smooth bowlders, 
half immersed, were each bound round, where they 


442 


PREDESTINED 


entered the water, with a ribbon of moisture; amid 
ripples, some swans continued to turn phlegmatically 
in circles, and to plunge their bills toward the bot- 
tom. Two or three men, leaning over the rail, were 
watching these manoeuvres. A large, dark blue auto- 
mobile, furnished with a “limousine,” stopped 
abruptly in the driveway. 

But the bull- terrier, at sight of so many large and 
obviously succulent fowls, became excited. Felix 
called him on, to a path beyond the bridge. It 
wound up a hillside, past steep rocks, and toward a 
thickly wooded region. 

To the right, overhead, roots projected from the 
summits of crags; to the left, the tops of trees were 
thrust up from a diminutive valley. Across the 
path, Australian firs let down their clumps of russet 
needles; a birch, perhaps, sent up a waving white 
column, and the way was lined with rhododendron 
bushes, all their long leaves adroop. These, in fact, 
continuing ahead, at every withdrawal of the cliff 
spread out in masses, then reappeared above, and, 
at a turn of the path, filled the middle distance with 
sun-drenched undulations. Farther on, where many 
trees swam together into a background at once con- 
fused and bright, here and there an oak or a beech 
had retained some remnant of its leafage, to disturb, 
with flecks of ochre and burnt umber, a fuscous 
monotone. 

Felix, however, discovered, to the left, a sloping 
lawn on which a few magnolias showed their pale 
trunks in incipient convolutions. He turned aside: 


NINA 


443 


though nearly exhausted, he began to climb among 
the rocks, by a path which at least should lead to 
solitude. Through a screen of rhododendron leaves, 
he saw a blue dress also moving upward, though by 
another way. The bowlders rose on either side of 
him, to form a rugged pass. 

They were seal-colored and glossy, but overlaid 
with patches in the most evasive shades of green and 
mauve; they were dull as iron, and full of infinitesi- 
mal corrugations, like old lava; or, all at once, 
becoming rough, they were covered with a sheen of 
mica. They composed not only the walls of this 
ascent, but the footpath also: the irregular steps 
resembled the worn bed of an old torrent. And it 
was steep, this acclivity between rocks so high that 
sunlight no more than touched their tops. But 
above the shadows, straight ahead, trees, towering 
in an amber mist, marked a splendid summit. 

Felix, gasping for breath, with failing limbs, was 
actuated by an irrational determination to win that 
goal. The crags fell away on either hand; a tim- 
bered landscape spread out below; directly before 
him, a woman clad in blue cloth and gray fur awaited 
his approach. 

His heart leaped into his throat. 

Inarticulate, he sank down upon a wooden bench 
half hidden by some laurel shrubs. Nina, advancing 
slowly, seated herself likewise. With gloved hands 
clasped in her lap, she regarded him. 

She said: 

“How you have changed !” 


444 


PREDESTINED 


He succeeded in replying: 

“And you, too.” 

She seemed to him an elder, fairer, consummate 
sister of her former self. The virginal charms which 
formerly had bestowed on her a somewhat tenuous 
allure, in this wife and mother had attained luxuriant 
development. Her beauty, indeed, appeared to him 
more complex and superb than that of a marble 
image clothed in gems: a thousand solved mysteries 
trembled in her gaze; and the familiar perfume 
which she still wore was more moving than a curtain 
of frankincense rising before a sanctuary. 

But he saw her again; she had approached him 
of her free will; he heard her voice! What fate 
was to be thanked for this encounter ? 

Passing in her automobile, she had glimpsed him 
watching the swans. She had got out at once, had 
sent the automobile home, and, following him up 
the hillside, had deliberately contrived their meeting. 
“So much time had passed; one should not hold 
animosity forever; besides, even from a distance she 
had noted an unhappy alteration in him.” 

He thought it would do no harm to say : 

“As for that, I have just left the hospital.” 

He was rewarded by a look of pity. 

“Tell me about it.” 

“It is not worth relating. But do you tell me 
about yourself, if you are willing.” He was aware, 
he added, of her marriage, and that she had a child; 
he had even seen her portrait by Pavin, whom he knew 
well. She showed no surprise at this announcement. 


NINA 


445 


They still kept the farm in Westchester County. 
Denis Droyt’s town house lay just east of Central 
Park. They had often travelled, until the birth of 
the baby. It was a boy, who resembled his father. 
When he was older, no doubt they would start off 
again, returning to New York for part of every 
winter season. 

“In short,” Felix ventured, frightened at his 
audacity, “much the sort of life that you and I 
once planned.” 

She looked down at her clasped hands. A pause 
ensued. 

“Tell me,” he asked, finally, “who was it that 
brought you word of me, that time ? A man named 
Fray?” 

“Mr. Tamborlayne wrote a letter to my mother.” 

He felt dizzy, at this sudden upheaval of an old 
conviction. 

“How little we know, of the past and of the 
future!” 

“That’s true,” she assented in a low voice, her 
glance flashing over him from head to foot. Then 
the dog attracted her attention. 

He came to her readily. His jaws wide open, his 
small, triangular eyes beaming with good-nature, he 
wagged his tail, made a wriggling motion, and sud- 
denly put his forepaws on her lap. She did not 
repulse him. 

“It is Pat; do you remember? You gave him 
to me.” 

“Is it he? I should not have known him.” 


446 


PREDESTINED 


And leaning forward, passing her hands over the 
bull-terrier’s ragged ears, she murmured, with a 
tremulous smile: 

“So many scars!” 

Felix watched her while she continued those 
caresses, with fingers deft, as he remembered well, 
to soothe and pet dumb brutes. 

Her blue cloth dress was plainly made; a simple 
toque of blue velvet did not conceal her thick brown 
hair; round her neck, and brushing her ear lobes, 
was a gray fur scarf. But each part of her attire 
was informed with an ineffable importance; a holy 
mantle could not have been more significant than 
the fabrics clothing her: her slightest movement 
swelled, as it were, the costume of a divinity. 

Looking up, she surprised an expression of won- 
der on his face. 

“What are your thoughts?” she inquired. 

“I am trying to convince myself that it is you. 
This is the sort of meeting that one experiences in 
dreams — a scene in which the impossible becomes 
natural, a situation never to be expected in reality. 
Then, too, I find in you a marvellous change. Or 
perhaps an accumulation of past thoughts of mine 
has given you a different aspect?” 

Once more it was the inevitable duo — but this 
time in a form how rare, how plaintive, how well 
attuned to variations in a minor key! 

“When we had our falling out, you thought, I 
suppose, that we could never be farther removed 
from each other? But ever since, I have been 


NINA 


447 


widening the gulf between us. You stayed on the 
heights, and I descended, step by step, into the 
depths. Your world remained the same, but mine, 
always changing for the worse, became, at last, a 
place such as you could not imagine. So, when 
you meet me here, of your own accord, I recall the 
angel that visited the pool.” 

Perceiving moisture in her eyes, he was filled 
with a profound satisfaction. He felt acutely the 
dramatic difference between them; he appreciated 
the ideal quality of their surroundings; he saw 
in himself the classic prodigal laying bare his soul 
before some exquisite personification of compassion. 
However, the poignant touch that should complete 
the episode was lacking. He furnished it. 

“Yet I have always struggled! An intuition, per- 
haps of moral origin, warned me of every pitfall: 
I hung back; but an irresistible force invariably 
drove me forward. And if that first transgression 
brought me, from the beginning, only misery, so it 
has been with all the rest. Still, I could gain nothing 
from experience. While yearning for the best, I 
had to choose the worst. I was like a man who 
staggers out of a fire only to be thrust back into 
the flames by an invisible hand. It was fate, that 
predestined for me a life of failure.” 

She replied, softly: 

“Some time ago I ceased to blame you.” 

Presently, she went on: 

“Do you remember old Joseph? He is still with 
me, very feeble, and sometimes childish. But he 


448 


PREDESTINED 


talks of you; and, when he grows garrulous, he 
relates tales that he would keep to himself, if his 
mind were stronger. Then, too, it was Paul Pavin 
who painted my portrait.” 

“I suppose you mean that Joseph told you of my 
loss of patrimony, and that Pavin had something to 
say about my subsequent life ?” 

For a moment she looked at him searchingly. 
Then a flush covered her face, as she replied : 

“ That’s it.” 

All the same, he found it difficult to understand 
how such information constituted an excuse for his 
career. 

They remained silent, gazing over the laurel 
shrubs. 

The sunshine had nearly left the tree trunks; but 
it lingered, in an accentuated effulgence, amid the 
branches. The firs spread out their countless soft 
tufts of needles as if for a final and more thorough 
blazoning, the oaks showed a few leaves like scraps 
of beaten gold, while the whole wide-spread mesh of 
limbs and twigs seemed ready to dissolve its myriad 
intricacies and pervade the still air, in a shimmering 
vapor. 

“What time is it, Felix?” 

“I don’t know.” 

She cast round her an uneasy glance which 
reached the farthest haze of tree tops. There, to 
the east and to the south, towered the “sky-scrap- 
ers” of the city. So their solitude had limits! She 
exclaimed : 


^INA 


449 


“It will be twilight soon. It is growing colder. 
And you have no overcoat !” 

Reaching forward, she felt the thickness of his 
clothing. Tears brimmed her eyes. He caught her 
retiring hand in his. 

“Don’t take your hand away. Something passes 
through your glove straight to my heart. All sorts 
of forgotten images reappear before me. The blind 
who were made to see must have had such sensations.” 

When he had bent down to kiss her fingers, he 
continued : 

“I went on and on; I believed I had lost myself 
in the shadows: but no — you were always there, far 
overhead. When spring came, I remembered the 
lilac bushes through the woods. When it was winter, 
I saw your face across a glow of candles. Or else I 
heard leaves rustling in the summer breeze, at night, 
and dreamed of the garden.” 

She closed her eyes. 

“ Maybe you were not alone in such thoughts.” 

“All my aspirations were, in the end, attempts to 
win your secret praise; and your mute reproach 
seemed to intensify all my remorses. There were 
even moments when it seemed to me that you were 
present, if not in person, at least in spirit.” 

“Perhaps there was cause for that belief.” 

She turned away her head; but he could see, 
above the gray fur scarf, her trembling chin. Then, 
facing him, she let her eyes rain tears. 

“We have been very unhappy!” 

He had never been happier than then. 


45 ° 


PREDESTINED 


“No, this repays me for everything! What does 
the rest matter, now?” 

And he added, with the thrill which comes to one 
who unexpectedly interprets, in a phrase, a prin- 
ciple of his life: 

“If it had turned out as we anticipated, the joy of 
our happiness might not have equalled the joy of our 
distress.” 

While she understood this speech, she did not 
assent to it. 

“On the contrary,” she protested, “to have been 
promised so much, and to have lost it all! To have 
had this meeting, and to part!” 

“Yes,” he agreed, gloomily, “I suppose that is 
what we must do.” 

In fact, she was already looking eastward appre- 
hensively. 

“And what about you?” she asked, while pressing 
a handkerchief against her cheeks. 

“It will be different with me, henceforth.” 

“Ah, Felix, if you will make that promise good! 
Perhaps it was not for nothing that I used to think 
of you as standing on a wonderful threshold. I have 
read somewhere, ‘To become a saint, one must have 
been a sinner.’ It is true, no doubt — at least, I 
know that I could find in a man who had fought his 
infirmities and conquered them a hundred times the 
worth of another, born to security.” 

Did she not have in mind her husband? A 
keener thrill pervaded him. 

“You shall see!” he cried. “And afterward?” 


NINA 


45i 


She hesitated. But finally, with the look of a 
woman brought, despite herself, for the first time 
in her life to the commission of a subtle treason, she 
whispered, with averted eyes : 

“ Who knows? ” 

Then she rose quickly. He was shocked to find 
their parting imminent. 

“But the sun has not set ! ’ ’ 

“And yet we’ve said too much!” 

She put out her hand. 

“I have your promise, Felix.” 

“Yes.” 

For a while they looked at each other through a 
mist. 

“Good-by.” 

“Good-by.” 

She departed. 

He watched her descend the hillside by a narrow 
path that wound eastward between rhododendron 
bushes. Her blue dress vanished behind tree trunks ; 
it reappeared farther on, diminished. A shaft of 
sunlight illumined her for an instant. She flitted 
through deep shadows. He could see her no longer. 
She had not looked back. 

The white bull-terrier peered up at Felix in- 
quiringly. 

The latter cast his eyes toward the confines of the 
park. 

And he felt that the horizontal sunbeams were 
bathing him in a sublime lustre. The earth was 
merged into the sky; the light, like an unalterable 


452 


PREDESTINED 


assurance smiling from afar, impartially benefited 
all it touched; and every substance in the universe, 
whether volatile or solid, growing or inert, revealed 
to him its meaning, its destiny, its harmony with all 
other substances and with the eternal. Was not he 
himself included in this synthesis? He seemed to 
share the will for evolution that pervaded everything 
existent; and he thought to recognize, deep in his 
nature, something of the inflexible determination 
which holds in place the firmament. 

He faced the west. The sunset seemed to be 
consuming all the cornices: the city that had been 
his prison was in process of dissolution. He gazed 
to the south-east. The windows of tall buildings, 
flashing forth great rays, were like the trophies of a 
conquered host suspended on the walls of temples. 

Finally, he went down the path by which he had 
ascended — between the rocks, past the rhododen- 
drons, beneath the firs, across the wooden bridge, 
the driveway, and the arch above the bridle path. 
He was no longer exhausted. As if in a trance, he 
set out, walking southward. 

On his right, roofs turned red: on his left, beyond 
a boundary wall, lamps showed among the branches 
points of clear yellow. Gradually, a whiteness filled 
the eastern sky, invaded the zenith, and descended 
toward the west. There, far beyond every cross 
street, was to be seen for a while, low lying, a thin 
strip of evanescent rose. 

Twilight gathered in the busy thoroughfares. He 
reached Union Square. 


NINA 


453 


The traffic threaded its way through a dusk 
studded with a confusion of lights. Close at hand, 
acetylene lamps blazed forth abruptly; trolley-cars 
rumbled past; horns and gongs sounded on all 
sides; and those afoot rushed forward, at intervals, 
between motormen straining at their brakes and 
automobiles halted with a wrench. Felix woke, so 
to speak, to find himself hemmed in by swiftly 
moving vehicles. 

A shout reached his ears. He turned to look 
for Pat. The dog, scampering toward him, disap- 
peared beneath an automobile. 

Felix jumped forward with a cry. The auto- 
mobile struck him, knocked him down, and, gather- 
ing speed, made off. 

But immediately he was on his feet. 

A crowd had already assembled in a ring, through 
which Felix pushed his way. In the midst, the 
white bull-terrier lay on his side, covered with dirt, 
his legs stretched out, his mouth closed. He did 
not move. 

Felix lifted the body, and held it to his breast. 
He stared round him blankly. Each face expressed 
commiseration. A man in a battered hat began to 
curse the rich. Another, his cheeks swelling with 
fury, demanded “a law for the regulation of speed 
maniacs.” One asked the rest if the automobile 
number had been taken. All turned to cast impo- 
tent glances into the dusk. Three policemen ap- 
peared simultaneously. Their spokesman, wearing 
a belted overcoat and a flat cap of blue cloth with 


454 


PREDESTINED 


an enamelled visor, lifted the dog’s chin. After 
scrutinizing the small, three-cornered eyes already 
glazed, he pronounced: 

“He’s kilt, all right.” 

Then, laying his palm on Felix’s shoulder, 

“Will you be wanting to dispose of him yourself?” 

Felix nodded. 

“All right, then. I’m sorry. I’ve got a dog of 
me own.” 

And, turning on the crowd, the policeman shouted, 
violently : 

“Now then, get out of here, the whole of yez! 
What do yez think this is — a show?” 

The spectators, however, reassembling on the 
pavement, were not to be denied the excitement of 
following Felix eastward along Fourteenth Street. 
The van of this procession with difficulty escaped 
treading on his heels; the line was continually 
re-enforced, and ragged youngsters ran ahead to 
look back at the body slipping from his arms. 
Dizzy and faint, Felix no longer knew where he 
was going. Debility seized on him again; his 
limbs seemed ready to resign their offices; he ex- 
pected every moment to plunge forward on his face. 

But there rose before him a round, familiar visage, 
like the countenance of a dumfounded Vitellius. 
It was Delaclaire sent, by chance, to the rescue. 

“Your dog! But not hurt?” 

“Run over. Dead.” 

“Great heavens, what news to take home! I feel 
that I’m going to be a touching messenger to-night!” 


NINA 


455 

Felix, once having come to a stop, was on the 
point of sinking with his burden to the ground. 

“I am just out of a hospital. This has nearly 
finished me. I must get somewhere at once.” 

“My dear boy! Forgive me. I know what you 
need.” 

And the Thespian drew Felix to the door of 
Quilty’s saloon. 

The younger man shrank back. 

“No, no!” 

Delaclaire wore the look of a benevolent old phy- 
sician whose patient exhibits a deplorable ignorance 
of his requirements. 

“Nonsense! You are in my hands.” 

He saw the foil-wrapped chandeliers, the mirrors, 
the pyramids of glasses. Quilty’s scar attracted his 
attention. The Thespian, while supporting F elix with 
one arm, was pouring out to the saloon keeper, with 
a wealth of florid gesticulations, “the tragic story.” 
Moreover, Connla was taking the dog’s body from him. 

The group entered the back room. There the 
detective laid Pat upon a table. Confronting Felix, 
he inquired, angrily: 

“How did it happen?” 

The other, sinking into a chair, buried his face in 
his hands. 

Delaclaire embellished his tale, this time, with 
several dramatic and entirely fictitious incidents. 

“The mob stormed the automobile! They threat- 
ened the chauffeur! But my friend, mastering his 
sorrow, restrained them . . . .” 


45 6 


PREDESTINED 


In short, facts no longer mattered to the actor. 
He was carried away by his imagination. Possibly 
he even “saw himself in the part.” 

Connla patted Felix on the back. 

“It’s just one of them things that can’t be helped, 
that hits us when we least expect it. It’s what we 
have to get used to.” 

Felix, raising his head, with difficulty got out the 
words : 

“He never left me. He never deceived me. He 
was never ashamed of me. I think he understood, 
all the while, what I wanted to do.” 

He collapsed in a paroxysm of grief. 

Delaclaire, who had darted out to the bar, re- 
turned, from caution more bow-legged than ever, 
bearing a small glass overflowing with whiskey. Dis- 
tributing between the detective and the saloon keeper 
a sapient look, he addressed the young man in 
coaxing accents. 

“You’ll feel better when you’ve had some of this.” 

The liquor was beneath his nose ; the fumes pene- 
trated his brain. He took the glass, and emptied it 
down his throat. Soon, he experienced a delicious 
relaxation. 

Another glassful intoxicated him. 

The Thespian, his anxiety relieved by the obvious 
effect of his prescription, was relating to Connla and 
to Quilty, in a mournful manner, an appropriate 
anecdote. 

“It’s not as if I couldn’t feel for him! I’ve had 
my own experience. Mine was a French poodle, 


NINA 


457 

Gyp — the most intelligent animal! We put her in 
an act that was a knockout from end to end of the 
country: just before the curtain, she tore open a 
sofa pillow and discovered the missing will. But 
one day, she et a piece of bacon rind covered with 
rat poison.” 

Connla, paying scanty attention to this chronicle, 
stroked the bull-terrier’s head. At last, clearing his 
throat, he said: 

“I remember well the first night I ever seen him. 
How he stuck his teeth into them niggers’ ankles! 
But, at that, I think it kind of went against the 
grain. He was a thoroughbred!” 

“A man gets attached to a dog,” was Quilty’s 
contribution. Moved, perhaps, by a variation of 
that impulse which results in “ wakes,” he ordered 
the bartender to bring in another “ round of drinks.” 
The saloon keeper’s own choice of beverage proved 
to be, as always, “a little lithia water.” 

Felix no longer shed tears. His bereavement had 
blended into a cloud of rapidly escaping thoughts. 
Leaning forward, with his hands dangling between 
his knees, he listened to the remote voice of the 
detective, who assured him that the dog should have 
a decent burial. There was a man uptown, it 
seemed, who made a business of the interment of 
pets. “And, as he’s broke the health laws once or 
twice, we’ll make him do the job for nothing. I’ll 
see to it.” 

“You are too good. You are one and all too 
good.” 


PREDESTINED 


45 $ 

Was it not fortunate that he should be solaced by 
three friends so considerate and so sympathetic? 

Later, he was bewildered to find eight dollars in 
his pocket. 

He parted from Quilty, Delaclaire, and Connla. 
The detective suggested seeing him home. They 
stood in the open; the stars were thick; a cold wind 
was blowing. 

“It’s not worth while. I live close by.” 

“But where?” 

“In this neighborhood.” 

“Well, just as you say. We’ll meet at Quilty’s, 
then, to-morrow morning.” 

“To-morrow morning.” 

He wandered through the streets. Whenever he 
saw the illuminated windows of a saloon , he pushed 
back the swinging doors. For the benefit of many 
strangers whom he met at bars, he began a sad 
monologue, which he was unable to finish; while 
trying to remember its conclusion, he sent a waver- 
ing glance round the floor, beneath the tables, into 
corners. 

But the stars drew near, to give him news of all 
that they had ever seen; the trailing clouds held 
pictures of steel-covered armies, like mirages linger- 
ing long after the ancient battles which they seemed 
to have reflected; and the earth whispered to him 
of all that it contained, deep down, where man had 
not been. Then the shapes of women moved before 
him, lighter than thistledown, and fairer than the 
moon. Their red lips parted; their tresses fluttered 


NINA 


459 

back; enlaced, they darted upward; their laughter 
fell in showers ; they shredded away. 

He woke with his head on a table, in the back 
room of a dram shop near the river — a resort for 
longshoremen. The sun shone through a dusty 
window. A shabby fellow was preparing to sweep 
the floor. 

Resting on his broom, the stranger favored Felix 
with a wink. 

“ There you are! A night’s lodging, and no 
charge.” 

“What time is it?” 

“Six o’clock, and a fine, crisp day.” 

Felix explored his pockets feebly, then pressed his 
hands against his head. 

“I feel very ill.” 

“Indeed, you look so! And no money? Well, 
now, suppose I take a chance, and stake vou to a 
drink?” 

“Thank you.” 

When he had swallowed some fiery brandy, he 
found himself able to start homeward. 

He was living in a four-story “hotel” that sur- 
mounted a cafe, on Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth 
Street. His week’s rent was overdue; and, as he 
had not been home for four days, it occurred to him 
that he must have been evicted. He found his 
room, however, as he had left it. 

An iron bedstead leaned against the wall opposite 
a wooden mantelpiece, painted to resemble oak. 
The washstand, its varnish nearly obliterated by 


PREDESTINED 


460 

many splashings, supported a basin and a pitcher. 
A small bureau by the window, and a straight-back 
chair, completed the furniture. His trunk stood 
' behind the door. 

When he had closed and locked the door, he in- 
spected his surroundings carefully. An alarm clock 
on the mantle-shelf attracted him. He began to 
wind it. Soon, a smile crossed his face, and he set 
down the clock but partly wound. 

In the bureau drawer, he found a box half full of 
headache powders. There were six “doses” left. 
He unfolded the papers, one by one, and emptied 
them into a glass tumbler. 

But he stopped short. Some one was knocking 
at the door. 

He held his breath. The knock was repeated, 
the door-knob rattled, and a voice called : 

“Felix?” 

Presently he heard Monsieur Pierre shuffle down 
the corridor. 

The contents of the six papers made in the bottom 
of the tumbler a little mound of powder. He added 
water from the pitcher on the washstand. Then he 
drank the mixture off. As he set down the tumbler, 
he asked himself: 

“What have I done?” 

With a feeling of scepticism, he approached the 
window. Through soiled Nottingham curtains, he 
saw the sun shining as brightly as before, the drays 
full of bales and boxes, the people hurrying to work. 


NINA 


461 

These passers-by were talking, laughing, full of life. 
He could not convince himself that he was on the 
point of leaving them. 

Suddenly, he perceived Monsieur Pierre o.n the 
opposite corner, in front of a saloon. 

The Parisian’s clothes were too large for him. 
With his knees bent, his shoulders stooped, his arms 
dangling, he turned his piebald beard repeatedly 
from north to south. Even at a distance, his anxiety 
was perceptible. He was awaiting Felix. 

After he had peered into several hundred faces, he 
removed his black felt hat with a gesture of hope- 
lessness. His bald head flashed. His shadowy eyes 
were raised to Felix’s window. But the Notting- 
ham curtain prevented a discovery. 

When he had again looked up and down the 
street — though this time more furtively than ex- 
pectantly — the Frenchman edged toward the saloon 
behind him. He put out his fleshless hand. The 
doors swung ajar. Monsieur Pierre, with surprising 
agility, slipped between them. 

“Poor old rascal!” thought Felix. 

His headache was gone. The serenity of the day 
before had returned to him. Leaning against the 
sash, he continued to look out, listlessly, at the 
pedestrians. 

They made haste, as if matters of great moment 
awaited them. All their faces showed a matutinal 
animation. It was the beginning of a fresh day for 
them. It was the world that hurried by. 


462 


PREDESTINED 


So it would be to-morrow, next year, a century 
hence, a thousand years from now! He found the 
thought wellnigh incredible, that everything would 
go on the same as ever. 

And she, too, would remain! 

He saw her with children coming to adolescence 
round her; in the fulness of her maturity, in the 
rich autumn of her life, in an exquisite old age. 
“Her charms can never fail; they can no more than 
change. She will attain, at last, that fineness of the 
aged who have been fair. She will appear in lace 
and silk and white hair. She will sit on a hill-top, 
her gaze roaming far away, while »the leaves flutter 
down upon her hands. She will be lost in dreams.” 

Oh, to have been, before departure, the close wit- 
ness of such a progress — to have reached, with one 
so dear, such a culmination! Others were des- 
tined to those delights, but he must miss them. 

Surely, if he desired another chance, there was 
still time? 

A determination, strong beyond his previous ex- 
perience, kept him motionless by the window. 

“That illusion shall not cheat me again. Life is 
a struggle that I am not fitted for.” 

Weakness descended on him. He turned to the 
bed. The floor moved beneath his feet. His skin 
was bathed in a cold moisture. Weighed down by 
an immense lassitude, he had difficulty in stretching 
himself upon the counterpane. 

“ Then I was not deceived. It is here ! ” 


NINA 


463 


And after a pause, 

“Why am I not afraid ?” 

He lay still, breathing with difficulty, curious to 
find the room so bright, and listening to the ticking 
of the clock. 

Confused images trembled in mid-air. 

He saw, at the same time, the Delaclaires gobbling 
sandwiches in their room, Pavin by the “north 
light,” old Joseph fashioning paper hats, Emma 
rolling up her large eyes, Marie posturing on the 
stage of the Trocadero Theatre, Eileen entering his 
room with parted lips. Mr. Snatt seemed to exhibit 
his nose in the dismantled chambers of a college 
student; while Noon showed his dusky visage in a 
parlor hung with the Ferrol family’s portraits. 
Then the Parisian’s bald head bent forward, and a 
pair of shadowy eyes pored over a pile of tattered 
magazines. 

All these figments were in some way related to 
one another: they were like portions of a tapestry 
which, read aright, should form an intelligible whole. 
But for him that decipherment was a task too ar- 
duous. A labor more important engaged his every 
faculty. 

He was at great pains to catch his breath. 

“How one’s instincts persist!” 

Was not this effort to breathe as futile as his 
countless past endeavors? 

“Yet if one might only be sure of achieving, 
elsewhere, the ideal . . . .” 


464 


PREDESTINED 


The ideal! He could not recollect in what it 
had consisted. It was as if a guiding beacon had 
gone out. 

At nine that night, the clock on the mantel-shelf 
stopped ticking. 












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